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Summarizing complex texts using cell phones increases understanding.

According to the Bakersfield Californian, a Stockdale High School student, who was physically assaulted by five older students, has settled his suit against the Kern High School District, the students who committed the assault and two other students for $260,000. The case illustrates the degree to which students and their parents can be held financially accountable in bullying cases. It also shows that students can be held financially responsible even if they are witnesses or simply know about such incidents, but don't tell authorities.

Significant concerns raised about student-teacher intractions in a social media environment, including the issue that students flirt. Relatedly, anything performed online by a public school employee - including information and images posted on social networking sites - will be used to judge the character of that individual. There is also the concern that the friends of the staff member may post unflattering information or tag inappropriate images of them which will quickly be used to prompt one major question: "Is this the kind of person we trust to be responsible for our children?"

Student -created videos telling powerful stories!! D.U.S.T.Y. is an afterschool program for middle and high school students in Oakland, CA. DUSTY students work on computers to create their own Digital Stories, as well at to generate rap and hip hop "beats and rhymes." Throughout the creative process, students learn to master programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, iMovie, and Fruity Loops with the help of skilled instructors. At the end of each semester, the students' creative masterpieces, including digital stories, raps, beats, and performances are showcased in some sort of final event at The Parkway Theatre, The Metro, and other local venues.

In this information technology age, children and youth in West and East Oakland face the additional disadvantage of a digital divide, which separates ethnicities, socio-economic classes, genders, and ages. Youth from low-income communities rarely have access to cutting edge communication technologies or, just as importantly, to empowering uses of them. A comparison between the number of computers per Oakland school with the schools' statewide academic performance ranking, or API, revealed that some schools with high numbers of computers have very low API's. This discrepancy suggests that simply having technology is not enough; rather, to improve student academic outcomes, technology must be meaningfully used.

A court case upholds administrators' rights to discipline a student who used derogatory language on a blog, but questions arise. In Doninger v. Niehoff, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in May that a Connecticut school district that disciplined a student for vulgar and derogatory remarks made off-campus did not violate her free speech rights.

A court case from May 2007. It was a sophomoric online video criticizing the hygiene of a teacher. Is suspension a violation of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech?

UPDATE: In a federal court session on May 23, 2007, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman turned down the request of Gregory Requa, 18, to grant a temporary restraining order ending the 40-day suspension. "The court has no difficulty in concluding that one student filming another student standing behind a teacher making 'rabbit ears' and pelvic thrusts in her direction, or a student filming the buttocks of a teacher as she bends over in the classroom, constitutes a material and substantial disruption to the work and discipline of the school. "The 'work and discipline of the school' includes the maintenance of a civil and respectful atmosphere toward teachers and students alike -- demeaning, derogatory, sexually suggestive behavior toward an unsuspecting teacher in a classroom poses a disruption of that mission whenever it occurs.

Bullying by students - filming teacher in the classroom - targeting a teacher and posting on YouTube ensuing court case about the accountability of the Kent School Board for making a decision on punishing a student using unsigned, unsworn statements from anonymous students

Good article from AMERICAN SCHOOL on the policies that schools need to have in place to protect both students and teachers from cyberbullies.

Today's students live in an incredibly high tech world- from cell phones to Facebook to YouTube to iPods- K-12 schools are faced with a multitude of new challenges that must be addressed in your student handbook. How can you restructure your student handbook to include the potential issues that may arise as a result of students' increased use of these technologies? Join us for a live, 60-minute audio conference where you and your colleagues will learn:
* Keys to Drafting K-12 Handbook Policies for Today's Students
* Online Use Policies: Facebook, MySpace & Online Communities
* Crafting Guidelines & Policies for Cell Phone & iPod Use at School
* Protecting Your School from Liability: What You Need to Know
* Cyberbullying & Technology Misconduct: What Educators Must Know

Just before midnight, an eMail popped into Robert Morris University professor Chris Davis' eMail box. It was from a student. When the student did not receive an immediate reply, another eMail arrived 30 minutes later. By the time Davis logged on the following morning, he had four eMails from this student. "A lot of our younger students using technology are used to that instant gratification when they reach out and ping somebody," Davis said. "But I tell students I'm not available 24 hours a day."

Students and parents at Windsor High School are outraged after a Wyoming police officer doing a presentation on Internet safety scrutinized individual students' MySpace pages, calling the students' pictures "slutty" and saying their sites invited sexual predators. The officer, John F. Gay III of the Cheyenne Police Department, picked out six or seven Windsor High School students' MySpace pages and began to criticize photos, comments and other content until one student left the room crying.

This three-part article includes a discussion of classroom connections to social networking sites and the school's role in intervening when information that affects the classroom is publicly posted on MySpace or Facebook. The authors also provide five key social networking tips:
1. Establish a policy for dealing with incidents in which students break school rules and their inappropriate behavior is showcased publicly on social-networking sites.
2. Outline clear guidelines for administrators that spell out how schools should discipline students based on information garnered from social-networking sites, and let parents and students know about those rules.
3. Educate students about online-safety issues and how to use sites such as Facebook and MySpace responsibly.
4. Have a policy in place for dealing with cyber bullying.
5. If teachers are using social-networking sites for educational purposes, they should establish clear guidelines for how they intend to communicate with students via those sites.

An excellent project for elementary students to connect with other classes.

A great way to get started with technology is to join in an exciting project. this project by Susan Silverman was designed using the principles of Universal Design for Learning. I've heard her present and she is a pro. (Along with my friend Jennifer Wagner.)

How a student spends their Two Million Minutes - in class, at home studying, playing sports, working, sleeping, socializing or just goofing off -- will affect their economic prospects for the rest of their lives. How do most American high school students spend this time? What about students in the rest of the world? How do family, friends and society influence a student's choices for time allocation? What implications do their choices have on their future and on a country's economic future?
This film takes a deeper look at how the three superpowers of the 21st Century - China, India and the United States - are preparing their students for the future. As we follow two students - a boy and a girl - from each of these countries, we compose a global snapshot of education, from the viewpoint of kids preparing for their future.

\n\nThe complete DVD is available for order on this web site. The web site also offers a preview version.

Four ideas for using Twitter with Students.

The calls began coming in Monday. A horrified guidance counselor, a teacher, and then a student lit up Boston's new antibullying tip line, telling officials about multiple Facebook pages that featured pictures of female high school students with derogatory and sexually explicit captions beneath them. Students and city and school officials say they have found at least 15 Facebook pages over the last few days that use obscene or hateful language to target female students, as well as a handful of male students, school administrators, and teachers at schools in Boston and surrounding communities. Boston officials have been scrambling to have the pages removed and have been meeting to figure out how to address the apparent cyberbullying and find the culprits. But as the offending Facebook pages come down, new ones go up. School officials and police are struggling to identify the perpetrators, who have been using fake names when they register with Facebook to create the pages. Police say they could pursue criminal charges if they determine that perpetrators have violated victims' civil rights.

The challenge for many college administrators today is how can they put cell phones to work for both students and the college. In Palo Alto, Calif., home of Stanford University, developers of an iPhone application called iStanford 2.0 hopes one day to see the iPhone replace the campus ID card. The entrepreneurial Stanford students have already produced a suite of iPhone applications that access the university's course catalog, campus map and other resources.The application suite was rolled out in October and has already garnered national attention, including winning the $10,000 grand prize for AT&T's "Big Mobile on Campus" contest for best smart phone application. One of the student members of the firm said he hopes to see the iPhone replace student identification cards in the future.

In a recent incident in which local teens "cyberbullied" a fellow Palo Alto student, school district officials said they helped remove the offending website and notified the parents of "six or eight" perpetrators who are students at Gunn and Palo Alto high schools. The bullying occurred over the weekend of Feb. 28, when some students created a Facebook "I Hate..." group targeting another student. The Internet group quickly gained up to 100 members and included vicious comments against the student as well as some posts in the student's defense. School district officials, who learned of the activity over the weekend, helped remove the Facebook group early on Monday, March 2.

In 2002, The No Child Left Behind Act said that students should be technologically literate by the end of the 8th grade. Texas developed a long list of specific technology skills students should know, but nobody has required that students learn them. "We have a difficult time finding the time for the students to be taught these technology skills since teachers have to focus on preparing students for the TAKS test," said Mark Gabehart, AISD's technology chief.

Talking on cellphones is passé for students who use them for networking and sending photos. Mobile Social Networking Software - the next wave of virtual community - is already appearing on cellphones, beginning with college campuses. These under-25s (the target market for early adoption of hot new gadgets) are using what many observers call the next big consumer technology shift: Mobile Social Networking Software, or Mososo. The sophisticated reach of cyber-social networks such as MySpace or Facebook, combined with the military precision of GPS, is putting enough power in these students' pockets to run a small country.

Last year, the Court ducked an opportunity to determine in Morse v. Frederick whether public schools have authority to restrict student speech that occurs off of school grounds. The Court's refusal to address this issue was unfortunate. For several decades lower courts have struggled to determine when, if ever, public schools should have the power to restrict student expression that does not occur on school grounds during school hours. In the last several years, however, courts have struggled with this same question in a new context -- the digital media. Around the country, increasing numbers of courts have been forced to confront the authority of public schools to punish students for speech on the Internet. In most cases, students are challenging punishments they received for creating fake websites mocking their teachers or school administrators or for making offensive comments on websites or instant messages. More often than not, the lower courts are ruling in favor of the schools.