Group items tagged

New book on the state of internet filtering worldwide

Excellent article by Suzie Boss at edutopia about filtration. I think this is an article to print and send to IT departments and headmasters. Excellent writing. Incredible article!

Excellent article on digital citizenship in schools.

Good advice for blocking bullying online and a public service announcement to spread the message. While the video is in English, the text on the web site is available in over 20 languages. Developed as part of Europe's Information Society portal, the web site celebrates "Safer Internet Day" (Feb 10th) by promoting safer use of the Internet and new online technologies, particularly for children.

This article offers seven things all adults need to know about social networking sites like MySpace.
1. Social networking is enormously popular with young adults.
2. Friends are probably just that.
3. Blocking sites at school won't keep kids away from MySpace.
4.Some degree of danger does exist for MySpace users.
5. The MySpace organization is working toward a safer online
6. Teachers might want to check to see if they have had a MySpace account created for them.
7.MySpace and social networking have value.

T.H.E. Journal [April 2008] Highlights how students may be disadvantaged in future career goals if blocks are put in their way to facilitate technology in learning.

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.

Welcome to X-BLOCK, the place for students to hang out, learn about cyber safety and share their online experiences with others. It is your turn to DRiVE. Make the cyber world your world!

We need to stop talking cyberbullying and start talking cybercitizenship. Flip to the positive. Our focus in schools needs to shift towards responsible, positive use of social media. We need to stop ignoring and blocking and start embracing and amplifying. It is our duty to our students to start modeling responsible use of social media and encouraging them to follow our lead.

It's no secret that we live in a world of moral panics -- where new technologies are feared by those who don't understand them, often leading to regulations that block their potential. For years now, a number of politicians have sought laws to ban social networks in schools, assuming that they are either bad or simply inappropriate for schools.

Steps parents can take to help kids avoid being victims of cyberbullying.
Kids have always been challenged by bullies, particularly at school. But in a high-tech age where the Internet, a personal cell phone and social networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace have become an integral part of young lives, there's a new kind of bully on the block.\n\n

So what is a teacher's role in keeping students safe online? Teachers and schools can actively block websites on desktops, laptops, and iPads but when it comes to a student's personal phone… that's a tricky area.

Thoughtful post! As long as internet safety and digital citizenship are presented as a business, with products to be purchased to prevent problems, curricula that purport to immunize children, and professionals required to deliver messages, it's no wonder that parents and teachers are paralyzed by the prospect of helping children negotiate their lives online. At the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) Annual Conference, held in Washington, DC last week, there was a striking confluence of those who view digital citizenship as an extension of our daily roles as citizens, and those who have a vested interest in keeping the alarm bells going in order to draw parents and teachers into their camp for speaking engagements, stand-alone curricula, web-tracking, web-blocking, or mobile phone tracking services.

The International Olympic Committee failed to press China to allow fully unfettered access to the Internet for the thousands of journalists arriving here to cover the Olympics, despite promising repeatedly that the foreign news media could "report freely" during the Games, Olympic officials acknowledged Wednesday.

James Logan High School, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, spans a large city block and has about 4,000 students attending its classes. Earlier in the year, some of those students made news-two for organizing a fundraiser for disaster relief in China and one for being among the winners of a national scholarship award program. That's the way schools hope their students make headlines. Unfortunately, another Logan student, 14-year-old Vernon Eddins, also made the news late last year-in that case, it was because he had become the latest victim of gang violence, which has been growing in Union City, where Logan is located.

Federal and local authorities arrested seven men for possession of child pornography today as part of an ongoing multi-agency investigation spearheaded by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI that has resulted so far in the filing of charges against 55 defendants who allegedly used peer-to-peer networks to exchange sexually graphic images of children.

Trends, Access, Quality, and Presidential Candidate Policies to be Studied in Aspen, Colo. August 9-12

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.

This is an amazing outline of what happens at leading edge middle schools.

Kevin Jarrett talks about his week at one of the leaders in innovative technology, suffern Middle School. An excellent read to see what this digital revolution is all about. Wow!

Scientists are blogging and communicating now, with an article in Time Magazine talking about how these scientific bloggers are changing the face of science. Having Access and being able to communicate digitally are becoming part of everyone's required knowledge base.

This website is a conglomeration of scientists who are blogging and writing.l They respond to research journals and bring forth "hot topics." In science. Time magazine has written an article about this site and how they are changing the face of science. Blogs are becoming integrated into all aspects of the world and knowing the method of writing effectively there is important.

Britannica is now free for bloggers. Another endorsements for the increasing importance of bloggers.

Encyclopedia Britannica is now free for bloggers from an article on 4/18/08 -- yet another reason for our students to blog. (I have students blogging publicly under pseudonyms.) This is fascinating, but also interesting to see how Britannica is playing catch up to Wikipedia in the market it once owned. I wonder, which would be more authoriative to you, a wikipedia quote updated daily, or Brittanica updated less often that doesn't display the authors of its content?