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The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is the key privacy regulation that protects children from having information about them collected by web site owners. In effect since April 2000, COPPA prohibits a web site owner or operator from "knowingly collecting information from children under the age of 13 unless the operator obtains parental consent and allows parents to review their children's information and restrict its further use."

William Glass III, 14, sends text messages like a middle-aged, technology-clueless English teacher. Properly spelled words. Correct punctuation. Precise capitalization. Lengthy paragraphs. No shortened words.

On June 30th, Missouri governor, Matt Blunt, signed a bill updating state laws against harassment by removing the requirement in the legislation requiring that such harassing communication be written or made over the telephone. Now, harassment from computers, text messages and other electronic devices may also be considered illegal. The amended law also requires school boards to create a written policy requiring schools to report harassment and stalking committed on school property to local police, including such done via the Internet.

Amends the Harassing and Obscene Communications Act. Creates the Cyberbullying Law. Provides that the offense of harassment through electronic communications also includes the use of electronic communication for making a harassing statement for the purpose of alarming, tormenting, or terrorizing a specific person on at least 2 separate occasions; or creating and maintaining an Internet website or webpage, which is accessible to one or more third parties for a period of at least 24 hours, and which contains harassing statements made for the purpose of alarming, tormenting, or terrorizing a specific person. Establishes penalties. Effective immediately. The new law takes effect January 1st and provides that the Internet safety curriculums in schools will begin with the 2009-2010 school year. The bill allows the age-appropriate unit of instruction to be incorporated into the current courses of study regularly taught in the districts' schools.

What is Cyberbullying?About a third (31%) of all students ages 12-14 have been bullied online according to a study by Opinion Research Corporation (2006). This research paper will examine some of the reasons for "cyberbullying," and what may be done about it.

The California Department of Education (CDE) and the Office of the Attorney General (AG) co-administer the School/Law Enforcement Partnership program. The Partnership has funded the Kern County Office of Education for a five-year period to administer the statewide School Safety and Violence Prevention Training Grant. The grant provides for safe schools planning, bullying prevention, and crisis response training. This training program does not currently include prevention of bullying that occurs via electronic communication devices. Need for the bill : A poll commissioned in 2006 by Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, showed that one in three teens and one in six preteens have been victims of cyber bullying and that more than 2 million of those victims told no one about the attacks.

"How I Learned to Type," was created by Diana Kimball and Sarah Zhang of the Digital Natives team. It takes a glance into how people of different ages learned one of the first skills every digital inhabitant needs - typing. Do you "peck" with two fingers, type in multiple languages at once, or have a typing teacher with a wooden leg? The people in "How I Learned to Type" do all this and more. Digital technology has become so ingrained in our lives that for digital natives, learning to type has become a ubiquitous experience, as memorable, say, as learning to read or ride a bike.

NYU professor and social networking expert Clay Shirky talks about where to draw the line between personal and public life online.
You live your life online -- and anyone can read it. Should employers be able to troll your Facebook or MySpace page? Or should everything that you put online be accessible to anyone, anywhere? With increasingly popular social networking sites aggregating unprecedented volumes of personal data, the age-old issue of online privacy is once again rearing its ugly head.

The Future of Reading: Digital Versus Print.
This is the first in a series of articles that looks at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has made it one of his priorities to install methods of protection for the state's children when it comes to using these Web sites, hoping to "make social networking safer," according to a press release generated by his office. Efforts by Facebook and MySpace to protect privacy are described in this article.

In alarming numbers, teenagers who think they are fully prepared to make ethical decisions are also driven by the pursuit of success to cheat, by time constraints to plagiarize, and by vengeance to inflict physical violence. This paints a disturbing picture for employers who will be relying on this age group to fill the pipeline in their future workforces. The fifth annual JA/Deloitte Teen Ethics Survey found that while most teens (71 percent) feel fully prepared to make ethical decisions in the workplace, nearly 40 percent of those young people believe that lying, cheating, plagiarizing, and violence are sometimes necessary to succeed in school. Download the attached Executive Summary and survey results documents to learn more.

From MySpace to Hip Hop, A MacArthur Forum, Part 2
This is the second of three videos, researchers who presented their work were: Mimi Ito, University of Southern California, Participatory Learning in a Networked Society:Lessons From the Digital Youth Project;danah boyd, University of California Berkeley, Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics; Heather Horst, University of California Berkeley, Understanding New Media in the Home; Dilan Mahendran, University of California Berkeley, Hip Hop Music and Meaning in the Digital Age.

Topping the list of tough issues children say they face are teasing and bullying, The Nickelodeon/Talking with Kids National Survey of Parents and Kids showed. To children ages 8-15, bullying ranks higher than violence, discrimination or pressure to have sex.

Although there are those high-profile news stories of how cyber bullying has led kids to commit suicide, most of it is much lower key. High-school-age kids tell stories of how cyber bullying has become a routine part of the world they inhabit, so pervasive that they can't imagine a time when it didn't take place.

While reports and stories in the media focusing on Internet predators have become all too frequent, the closer-to-home threat to our children may really be cyberbullying, also known as electronic or online bullying. A recent survey of 395 students (11 to 19 years old) found that 28% of students have been cyberbullied, and more than 1 in 7 admitted to acting as the bully."Cyberbullying could be the biggest online threat facing teens today," says James Leasure, co-founder of Pandora Corp. "Of course Internet predators do still exist, but statistically, kids have a much greater chance of being involved in some way with electronic bullying." Most cases of cyberbullying go undocumented because, fortunately, many kids are able to shrug off the 'unkind words' and look the other way. But there are some cases that make national headlines when they turn into tragedies, such as the Megan Meier case in 2006. Larger cases like this have prompted several states to adopt legislation that makes online bullying illegal.

The Rochester Regional Cybersafety and Ethics Initiative has conducted the largest cyber safety and ethics survey of K-12 students in the Nation, with more than 40,000 students throughout the area participating. This new study shows that the majority of cyber offenses involving children, adolescents and young adults are perpetrated, not by adults, but rather by peers of approximately the same age or grade level. For a summary of the research report, see: Key RIT Cybercrime Research Findings.

This is great information to distribute at your next PTA meeting! The MySpace folks put control back in the hands of parents with their new ParentCare Software, a free, simple software tool designed to help parents safeguard their teens. ParentCare helps parents determine whether a child has a MySpace profile and validates the age, user name, and location listed by the teen. Currently in beta form and available for Windows users only. Both MySpace and IKeepSafe provide links to the download. The IKeepSafe site provides an additional flash video explaining the software. It is located at: http://www.ikeepsafe.org/parentcare/index.php

Asks the students to find the mistakes in the conversation ith Anthony.

Videos where students are asked to see the mistake that someone made with their new friends. This is a pretty interesting video to show and makes a ooint about age.

great article on the new meaning of "friend" in the age of social networking

NBC Learn, the education arm of NBC News, this week launched a new collaborative learning site that combines gaming and multimedia for students aged 13 and up. Called iCue ("Immerse, Connect, Understand, and Excel"), the service builds on research out of MIT's Education Arcade, housed at MIT's Comparative Media Studies, to integrate traditional learning activities with new technologies.