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Nearly 41 million school-age children in the United States have access to expensive online educational tools like Live Homework Help, thanks to their public libraries. In fact, some 83 percent of U.S. public libraries provide their community's vital-and many rural areas, only-link to Web tools that might otherwise be out of their financial reach.

Anybody can post information on the Internet, making it possible to find "proof" of any ideas or beliefs you can imagine. Yet to many students, "If it's on the Internet, it must be true." Alan November has put together some very cool examples of web sites to use when teaching students to authenticate information that they find online.

From TICAL - Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership.
These are short presentations to help busy administrators and teachers gain a better understanding of the variety of tools on the World Wide Web.

Anybody can post information on the Internet, making it possible to find "proof" of any ideas or beliefs you can imagine. Yet to many students, "If it's on the Internet, it must be true."

Bumped in to this today -- would you belive in coincidences -- Parents as Partners at joined by Steve Hargadon tonight 14 April 9pm PDT (too late for GMT me) -- participate at chatroom http://edtechtalk.com/live -- to discuss web2.0 pedagogies in schools and best practices for educating parents -- I so wish I could stay up but will have to leave that for others (aka feedback request please) -- although thinking about it I might manage to get up early the following day (ouch).

An effective school-based strategy to address the issue of online safety should include these six key components:
EDUCATIONAL USE - Schools must ensure that when students use the Internet, their activities have an educational purpose -- class assignments, extra credit work, and perhaps some high quality enrichment activities as a reward
SUPERVISION AND MONITORING Schools must shift focus from reliance on filtering to better supervision and monitoring.
MEANINGFUL CONSEQUENCES Misuse of the Internet must lead to a meaningful consequence -- but it should be recognized that suspension of Internet access privileges just causes more work for teachers. Requiring a service contribution to the school and establishing "close monitoring status" for all Internet use are preferable consequences.
ACCIDENTAL ACCESS TO PORN - All students and staff must know that if inappropriate material appears, they should quickly turn off the monitor or turn it so it can't be seen, and then report it. Following any incident or discovery, there must be a responsible assessment of culpability.
INAPPROPRIATE BLOCKING Selected staff in every school building must have the authority and ability to quickly override the filter to provide other staff or students access to sites that have been inappropriately blocked
INTERNET SAFETY AND RESPONSIBLE USE EDUCATION Schools must provide effective Web 2.0 Internet safety and responsible use education to students and parents.

Children may be net savvy but their critical reading and research skills are not finely honed. They don't understand that they shouldn't believe everything they read. To kids, WIKIPEDIA is still the gospel.

Except for the occasional plagiarized passage or unattributed reference in student research papers, most veteran K-12 educators have had little experience dealing with copyright issues in their classrooms. With the advent of the Internet, however, their need to know about copyright law and to understand its implications for such activities as Internet research, downloading programs and documents, creating class Web sites, and installing software on school networks has increased dramatically.

This web site was developed by Mike Ribble, co-author of Digital Citizenship in the Schools. He covers the 9 areas of Digital Citizenship that are outlined in the book and offers many examples of how educators can begin the process of teaching their students how to use technology more appropriately. These resources can be used by any anyone who is interested in helping students or others better understand appropriate technology use.

Learning to Change Changing to Learn Advancing K-12 Technology Leadership, Consortium for School Networking(COSN) Video. COSN was the recent recipient of a $450,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation to explore policy and leadership barriers to Web 2.0.

This free five-part video series on Cybersafety & Internet Awareness for Parents & Educators was produced by the Orange County Office of Education [California] and is hosted by Mark Wagner & Victor Guthrie. It includes a clip with Katie Canton of Web Wise Kids, telling the story of her experience with a man she fell in love with in a chatroom, only to later discover that he was an online predator.

Kristin Hokanson's wiki showing how classrooms can connect.

Kristin Hokanson's excellent wiki with many Web 2.0 resources. Excellent site!

Excellent wiki full of resources from Kristin Hokanson. Wow!

The K12HSN Professional Development Cafe is a series of videoconferences around a variety of areas of interest for K-12 school personnel. Participation in these sessions is available through videoconferencing or through web streaming.

A majority of teenagers who go online maintain one or more profiles at social networking Web sites. Most teens restrict access to to their profiles, but "friends" who access the profiles routinely number in the hundreds. Mary Madden, a senior researcher with the Pew Internet and American Life Project, tells Robert Siegel that society will likely become more accepting of the "digital footprints" young people leave online. Good discussion points in here for a digital citizenship class.

Use the powerful medium of the web, and advances in streaming video technology to help you think, speak out and act on important issues happening in the real world outside your windows.

Excellent organization and competition that is managed very well.

This fascinating project needs judges (oh and horizon still does too!) -- hat tip to David Warlick for this link.\n\nThe student web site entries are due in tomorrow (April 2) for the 2008 competition, and ThinkQuest needs people to judge these entries. To be a judge, you must be employed as a teacher or have a minimum of five years experience in the field of education; be proficient in the English language; and be able to, and have the time to evaluate and score websites based on the provided criteria.

Digital Nation is a new, open source PBS project that explores what it means to be human in an entirely new world -- a digital world. It consists of this Web site as well as a major FRONTLINE documentary to be broadcast on Feb. 2, 2010.

Currently four missions are available for students with the following themes: email/spam, chatroom safety/privacy, cyberbullying awareness, web dangers. Download and print the hint sheets for each series.

Higher ed requires incoming freshmen to take Composition and some form of math, and so, too, should universities require students to take a course that helps them identify reputable information in the vast expanse of the web.