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The research indicates that the movement toward Web 2.0 use to engage students and address individual learning needs is largely being driven in districts from the bottom up – starting with teachers and students

Overall, the research confirms school districts are using or planning to use several types of Web 2.0 technologies, but reveals there is still resistance to using online social networking for instructional purposes.

ther key results of the survey include: The three most frequently cited reasons for adopting Web 2.0 technologies are: addressing students’ individual learning needs, engaging student interest, and increasing students’ options for access to teaching and learning. Online communications with parents and students (e.g., teacher blogs) and digital multimedia resources are the Internet technologies most widely used by teachers, and a majority of districts have plans for adopting these technologies or promoting their use. Teacher-generated online content (e.g., multimedia lessons, wiki-based resources) is likely to be the next area of growth in the use of Web 2.0 technologies. Almost half of districts have plans for adopting or promoting the creation and sharing of this content through Web 2.0 tools.

Lance Armstrong loves it. Oprah’s all over it. Ashton Kutcher found a million people to follow him on it. Heck, Barack Obama used it to get elected president. So why is Twitter in trouble? According to David Martin, Vice President of Primary Research at Internet traffic monitor Nielsen Online, the site suffers from a retention problem. From month to month, Nielsen data says, just 40 percent of Twitter’s users return to it.

The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) is organising on 5 May 2009 (pm) a public presentation on protecting children from harmful content and conduct online. The issue of child protection in regards to online technologies is of major and continuing concern to policy- and law-makers, the wider ICT industry and its end-users. In spring 2008, the EESC unanimously adopted its most recent of several opinions on this topic

This is a follow up to the post on the Meeting on 5th May here.The Opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee on the Proposal for a Decision of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing a multiannual Community programme on protecting children using the Internet and other communication technologies represents the latest in a series of initiatives introduced by the European Parliament and Council to promote children’s safety and well-being in the information society.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) today published its Annual Report 2008 revealing a fall of nearly 10% in the number of international websites with child sexual abuse content. The report warns against complacency, pointing to the serious nature of the images which are often carried on commercial websites.   The report also highlights the fact that 74% of child sexual abuse domains traced by IWF are commercial operations selling indecent images of children, and 75% of the these (some 850 unique domains) are registered with just 10 domain name registries. This underlines the importance of recent international efforts with domain name registries to get the site names delisted, and will remain a focus of IWF attention going forward.

Remember that time you got hammered, dressed up in drag, vomited on your shoes then passed out at the bar only to wake up with marker all over your face?No?Pity the Internet doesn't forget so easily.

For years, Symantec has included a parental-control element in its Norton Internet Security and Norton 360 packages. It's so limited as to be nearly useless, so for years I've given it poor ratings. OnlineFamily.Norton is a huge improvement, on a par with the best existing parental-control programs. Now both suites offer it as an alternative to the old, lame Norton component. Users should definitely choose it instead. The new free offering is a strong contender, matching almost all the features of the top paid parental control systems.

In a survey of 45,000 children in middle school, 85 percent said they have been cyberbullied at least once, said Parry Aftab, executive director of the Internet safety group WiredSafety.org, based in Irvington, N.Y., about 20 miles northeast of New York. Just 5 percent admitted it at the high school level, she said.

Instead of these technologies being used to usher in a new age of youthful activism in Iran, they now serve as a window for the entire world into the repressive tactics of the regime.

It is difficult to tell what the ultimate impact of these technologies will be for Iran. Nor is there any proof publicly available to support the claim that the vote was rigged in Mr Ahmadinejad’s favour. But the regime’s reaction to both the accusations of foul play and to the young people who demonstrated both in the streets and on the internet, is telling. As hard as a government tries to stifle dissenting voices, those voices will only try harder to be heard, and there is little that Iran can do to stop them. Technology always seems to be one step ahead of the censors.