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Services like Twitter and Plurk let people post very short messages (140 characters or less) to their friends and acquaintances. Founded in 2006, Twitter has attracted millions of users who keep people posted about what they're doing and thinking. It can be as simple as "I'm standing in line at the grocery store" to as profound as a quick comment about a political candidate, a world event or a new book. There's even a video spin-off of this concept called 12 Seconds that allows people to post video clips no longer than 12 seconds.

The Rapid City School District is paving the way for students and teachers to let their opinions be heard on the World Wide Web. The district has revamped its Web site and one of the new features will allow teachers and students to blog. A handful of teachers are already using the blogging option in their classrooms, but the 'blogs' aren't what you might think.

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."

David Kosslyn and two other students are in the process of developing StudyBuddy - an online academic social networking site that allows students to form study groups with others taking courses in the same subject areas, both on/off the same campus.

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.

When school starts today, Broward County schools will be armed to take action against you.A new district policy, adopted July 22, allows a range of punishments, from "positive behavioral interventions" to suspensions for students, to sanctions against teachers' certificates for "egregious acts of bullying." Included are cyber-stalking and cyber-bullying, which experts say are becoming more common among South Florida students.

A teenage girl has sued her private, all-girls Catholic school, claiming it allowed bullying to spread from the classroom to online social networks.

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.

Sexual predators are using gaming consoles such as the Wii, PlayStation and Xbox to meet children online. "Child predators are migrating from traditional methods to alternate media," says Detective Lt. Thomas Kish of the Michigan State Police. "They are going to places where children are." Predators view games that allow kids to access the Internet and text message other players as a "foot in the door," he says.

Well-integrated technology opens social networks for students and allows children to develop key social skills, according to two recent studies conducted by researchers at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Frustrated by workers so plugged in that they tuned out in the middle of business meetings, a growing number of companies are going "topless," as in no laptops allowed. Also banned from some conference rooms: BlackBerrys, iPhones and other devices on which so many people have come to depend.

The company will provide content blockers that allow parents to prevent their children from accessing certain content, application filters to keep children from using software and will empower parents with time limiting tools to control time spent on various Internet activities.

People used to say a child's suicide ripples through a community. These days, it rides an electronic wave. Teenagers relay the news with cell phone calls, text messaging and Internet social networks, complicating the efforts of teachers, counselors and parents trying to manage grief after a young person's death. To our readers This series stems from our continuing examination of what led 19-year-old Robert Hawkins to become a mass killer last December at Omaha's Von Maur store. Today's stories describe how Internet postings, cell phones and text messages allow teens to spread their angst rapidly under the radar of adult oversight. Three-part series The World-Herald investigation into Robert Hawkins' murder spree and suicide last December leads to the discovery of a teen suicide cluster in Sarpy County. Sunday: Connections between suicidal teens cross community and school district lines. Today: Technology spreads teenage grief and angst quickly, with no parental oversight. Tuesday: A widely used but controversial suicide screening program is urged for use in Nebraska schools. Cyberspace is fertile ground for suicide contagion. It provides a forum for prolonged and excessive grieving in a highly charged, emotional atmosphere - precisely the kind of atmosphere psychologists warn to avoid after a death. It is also unmonitored by all but the most vigilant parents.

Texting is a form of wireless communication where users send or receive short, digital messages electronically. Texting is also known as SMS (Short Message Service). Although the bulk of texting is done via mobile-to-mobile devices, websites and companies are also jumping on the bandwagon. Some companies allow users to "web text" by sending and receiving text messages to mobile devices from their computers. Many provide the service for free. Text messaging is an extremely popular method of communication. CTIA-The Wireless Association®, the international association for the wireless telecommunications industry, reported that over 48 billion text messages were sent in a one-month period in 2007, which averages 1.6 billion messages per day.

Just as YouTube has changed the way we watch video and Wikipedia has changed the way we find information, Kiva.org - the world's first online person-to-person microlending platform - is changing the way we give back. Kiva lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur in third world countries, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty. There are many great classroom connections here for global citizenship, math, geography etc. Kiva also allows you to develop a social network with other contributors supporting the same entrepreneur.

The challenge for education "How do we handle the abundance of inputs and outputs available to our students given the scarcity of two major problems in our schools: Allowed / Accepted Channels of Access (number of computers per child, bandwidth, filtering, restrictions on publishing, etc...) and time. \n

As we are pioneers in cyberspace, cybersafety is a concern that is being refined and evaluated all the time - trying to balance transparency with privacy, allowing students some freedom, yet protecting them and ensuring their safety at all times. This article provides a review of what was done with a class of students over a year's time to teach them digital citizenship and cybersafety.

An excellent project for 4th - 6th grade sudents from Jennifer Wagner called the Prince Caspian project which will allow teachers to collaborate with other teachers around the world about the book and the upcoming movie "Prince caspian."

Excellent global collaborative projects from one of the experts, Jennifer Wagner.

Citation Machine is an interactive web tool designed by David Warlick to assist high school, college, and university students, their teachers, and independent researchers in their effort to respect other people's intellectual properties. The updated version 3.0 [Dec 2007] allows for multiple authors and remembers your citations for later bibliographies.

After spending the day practicing cursive writing and discussing how money moves through a community, Mike Ice's second-graders at Dunn Elementary took out their notebooks and described what they'd learned - in 140 characters or fewer.