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.

Six tips for providing feedback and becoming a top commenter.

Are you thinking of starting student blogs? Here is a great rubric that can be used to guide and assess student writing.

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.

Despite being developed by a 17-year old as a way to randomly video chat with people from around the world, ChatRoulette has quickly become a cause for concern about children (and adults) seeing objectionable activities. Larry Magid offers advice on what it would take to make the technology a much more useful video social networking site.

Because many students had already taken part in the blogging challenge, it was decided in September 2009 to extend to two challenges - one for better bloggers and another for better commenters. Over 600 individual students and 80 classes totalling a possible 3000 students registered this time. Again we had participation from 15 countries of the world, some bloggers were only just starting, others had their blogs for over a year.\nIt is now 2010 and the student blogging challenge has its own blog. You can register here for the 2010 challenge: http://studentchallenge.edublogs.org/about/march-2010-register-here/

Blogging rules for students and teachers, as created by Hillsdale Public Schools.

An inappropriate comment has arrived on a student site. What do you do? How do you turn this into a teachable moment?

The scribes in my classes continue to do outstanding work. I'm continually impressed by the depth and quality of the student's scribe posts. They work so hard on their scribes. Why do they do that? Most high school students look for the easy way out; "How can I get by with the minimum amount of effort on my part?"

One technique I used to push the learning connections and stretch students to higher levels of thinking is suggesting the use of comment starters to students. I encourage them to use these and encourage them to add to the list. These help students compose responses to posts at higher levels than just "I liked what you said" type of replies. It is a starting point.

The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students' writing and for the college curriculum.

Great 30-second teen PSA on protecting yourself online.

Empowering students to prevent violence in schools. We have used this video at many CTAP workshops on cybersafety/cyberbullying and it's very effective.

This mini-unit (set of lessons) uses games, easy explanations, and the "Trading Places" episode of the popular animated series CYBERCHASE to teach kids about financial literacy.

"Managing Students on Blogs…What Role Do You Assign Students?"

More advice from Sue Waters on how to moderate comments and posts using GMail.

Tips For Better Blogging, Using Blogs With Students, Working With Web 2.0 Tools - Sue Waters (April 09). Sue describes a process for monitoring student blogs using Google Reader.

Another great 30-second PSA on cyberbullying created by students at the Student Television Network Conference in Anaheim [March 2010]

Third Place winner of "Cyberbullying Public Service Announcement" contest at the Anaheim Student Television Network Conference, March 2010.