Group items tagged

Without his input, Bryan Rutberg's Facebook status update -- the way friends track each other -- suddenly changed on January 21 to this frightening alert, "Bryan NEEDS HELP URGENTLY!!!"

Cybercriminals have launched a massive new wave of Internet-based schemes to steal personal data and carry out financial scams in an effort to take advantage of the fear and confusion created by tumbling financial markets, security specialists say.

MySpace says about 90,000 sex offenders have been identified and removed from its huge social networking website. North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper said Tuesday the new figure is nearly double what MySpace officials originally announced last year.

The efforts are few and far between right now, but as the world of blogs, wikis and podcasts grows, an increasing number of Canadian educators are finding new ways to enrich the learning experience for their students.

Bumped in to this today -- would you belive in coincidences -- Parents as Partners at joined by Steve Hargadon tonight 14 April 9pm PDT (too late for GMT me) -- participate at chatroom http://edtechtalk.com/live -- to discuss web2.0 pedagogies in schools and best practices for educating parents -- I so wish I could stay up but will have to leave that for others (aka feedback request please) -- although thinking about it I might manage to get up early the following day (ouch).

As far as high-tech misunderstandings go, this was a big one. An East Stroudsburg University sociology professor made two provocative posts on her Facebook page, according to the Web site Inside Higher Ed: "Does anyone know where to find a very discreet hitman? Yes, it's been that kind of day" and, "had a good day today, DIDN'T want to kill even one student :-) Now Friday was a different story."

Findings from the PEW RESEARCH REPORT: "Social Media and Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults."

A former Florida high school student who was suspended by her principal after she set up a Facebook page to criticize her teacher is protected constitutionally under the First Amendment, a federal magistrate ruled.

Less than 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies of Dan Brown's blockbuster novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times.

As millions seek new jobs to replace positions lost in the recession, keep in mind that the Internet gives employers unprecedented access to information about you.

Many school districts are adopting Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) to educate parents and students about Internet use and issues of online privacy and safety, and seek parental consent for their children's use of the Internet. For example, an AUP may tell parents about the privacy policies of online services with which a school has contracts and students' use of non-contract websites. It may include cautions against children disclosing personal information to websites - such as their full name, home or email address, and telephone number. Or it may tell parents that the school has established classroom email accounts rather than individual accounts if email communication is necessary between students and online services.

TechLiteracy Assessment uses a blend of interactive, performance-based questions and multiple choice, knowledge-based questions to measure and report technology literacy for elementary and middle school students

Many students and recent graduates say they are changing their names on Facebook or tightening privacy settings to hide photos and wall posts from potential employers.

The keystroke is mightier than the sword, was the message that social studies teacher Gideon Sanders of Washington, D.C.'s McKinley Technology High School helped send last October.( (While 200 angry McKinley Tech students took to the streets to protest the loss of 15 of their instructors and counselors after the layoff of 229 D.C. public-school teachers (see video HERE)-and a scuffle with police resulted in the arrest of one student and one adult-11th graders Aaron Kitt and D'Angelo Anderson took to their screens.

In the United States, there's no federal law against cyber bullying -- yet. A bill introduced to the House of Representatives last year would make it against the law to "transmit in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior." Anyone found guilty of this crime could face a fine or a prison term of up to two years.

Student government members at BTHS received an email saying a construction accident caused school to be closed the following day. From there, the message spread rapidly across social networks. Problem was there had been no accident, and the email, while appearing to come from an official school address, was a gag, which the student newspaper subsequently reported later that evening. "This looked believable, but it could not be corroborated from an official source," says Kevin Jarrett. That's critical, he says, and goes to the cornerstone of any lesson on Internet safety for students-make sure to know where information is coming from by developing a healthy skepticism. But administrators also need to learn how easily these kinds of pranks can be generated."

Anthony Orsini sent an e-mail blast to the Benjamin Franklin Middle School community in Ridgewood, New Jersey, on Wednesday, urging parents to take down their children's online profiles on Facebook and elsewhere. "There is absolutely no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site!," he wrote. "Let me repeat that - there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site!" The main problem, he wrote, is that tweens do not have the resilience to withstand internet name-calling. "They are simply not psychologically ready for the damage that one mean person online can cause," he said.

"Internet filters in schools often compromise a teacher's ability to teach, yet at the same time are easy for tech-savvy students to get around, a parliamentary committee on cyberbullying has heard. The Federal Parliament undertook a cyber-safety committee late last week to investigate community concerns about protecting children from bullying online and the measures that could be used to prevent it, such as Internet filtering."

A new reporting tool will let Facebook users, including teens and younger users, to privately report troubling content not just to the site itself but to parents, teachers and others in their support system. And an improved Safety Center, due out in the next few weeks, will provide educational videos, articles and other content created by bullying experts to help adults address the problem.