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Social Networks may be on the increase in populations, but marketers still struggle with how to get users to respond to advertising.

This week, the Hoover Board of Education is holding a technology training seminar to help teachers get up to speed for the new school year. On the agenda - a powerful and somewhat controversial website called "Second Life".

Dizzywood, a virtual world and online game for children ages 8-12, today announced that it has been selected by the YMCA of San Francisco to enhance the youth program's technology curriculum. The YMCA is using Dizzywood's virtual environment to reinforce its program emphasis on activities that promote values such as caring, honesty, respect and responsibility. Children also learn about important issues relating to virtual worlds, such as digital citizenship and online safety, as well as complete storytelling and team-building exercises that emphasize creativity, writing and reading skills, and working together to achieve goals. The YMCA program is similar to the elementary school program that Dizzywood recently completed with the Reed Union School District (Marin County, CA). The highly interactive workshop, which ran from April through June, used virtual activities to reinforce the school's character pillars, which include caring, citizenship, fairness, respect, responsibility and trustworthiness, among other core values.

Summarizing complex texts using cell phones increases understanding.

Cybersafety expert and Internet Law Attorney, Nancy Willard, has some ideas for schools as they develop and adapt safety strategies to address Web 2.0. She also offers some questions that school staff can discuss to assess and improve the manner in which they are addressing these issues in their building:

FRONTLINE had developed materials for teachers, parents and kids to accompany Growing Up Online. These resources include downloadable viewing guides for parent and for teachers that includes a seven-part discussion question section, lesson plans for the classroom, resources for building parent-teen online engagement, and a Cyberquiz: "What Kind of Cyber Guide are You?" that explores parents' media management styles.

A San Francisco wiki services provider has just finished a multiyear project under which it gave teachers all over the world 100,000 free wikis. And now, it is doubling up and getting set to give away another quarter million. The company, Wikispaces, decided in 2006 that it would make helping teachers use the collaborative software to further cooperation between students, both in their own schools and with schools in other cities and countries, a cornerstone of its business. But while Wikispaces hasn't made any money directly from the project--and in fact has incurred significant costs due to supporting the teachers' use of the wikis--co-founder Adam Frey said the company has found that the educators are just the kind of evangelists that can aid a start-up in building a business.

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.

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.

Recommendations for privacy settings on Facebook and how to do it.

The focus of this web site is to help your kids understand how technology affects their privacy, and what they can do to build secure online profiles while keeping their information safe.

As students in Reading Workshop begin to build their blogs, post by post, the need for some structure in commenting is evident. Hopefully these guidelines will help students engage in meaningful dialogue, comment by comment. Here are seven rules for blog comments.

Conversation starters with students from the NYT. Participating in an online discussion on events and issues in the news not only gives students a forum, but it also helps them build critical thinking, writing and news literacy skills and provides an opportunity to write for an authentic audience.

Software That Guards Virtual Playgrounds

The last "highlight" is particularly telling.

HE Journal recently spoke with Knezek about the myriad of opportunities schools and teachers have available to them, both for exploring new technological tools and solutions in education and for making optimal use of the resources already at their immediate disposal. "The real goal," Knezek explained, "lies in moving all the programs in a school forward toward 21st century learning, or digital age learning."

The digital world can be tricky for teachers.Those who grew up in the pre-Twitter era are often left casting about to learn how to use new technology and keep up with students. Others, comfortable with using text messages and Facebook to make connections, find themselves questioning, as they navigate the new frontier, just where students fit in.

Lesson plans developed for a group of students at Ute Meadows Elementary on the idea of creating and tending their Digital Legacy (or what some people call "digital footprint"). Some excellent examples here of building and protecting your digital identity.

Materials from Learning Library, Teachers' Strategy Guides & Ethics Casebook