Ad4dcss/Digital Citizenship

The American Civil Liberties Union wants Tennessee districts to stop blocking non-sexual Web sites that advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered individuals. Those include:

Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, www.pflag.org• The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, www.glsen.org• Human Rights Campaign, www.hrc.org• Marriage Equality USA, www.marriageequality.org• Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry, http://rcfm.dbdes.com/myshare.php • The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, www.glaad.org• Dignity USA (an organization for LGBT Catholics), www.dignityusa.org

Removing a school library media specialist, who is an expert [at helping students acquire 21st-century information skills], from a library becomes a disadvantage for the students in that school," she said.

he American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contains funding for educators to implement innovative strategies in Title I schools that improve education for at-risk students and close the achievement gap. The funding is flexible and, for the most part, the control rests in the hands of local and state superintendents--and spending some of it on school libraries would be a wise investment, ALA asserts.

NetModerator, a software tool built by Crisp Thinking, a private company based in Leeds, England, can monitor online chat “for intent as well as content,” says Andrew Lintell, the company’s chief executive. To build the tool, he says, Crisp Thinking analyzed roughly 700 million lines of chat traffic, some from conversations between children and some, like conversations between children and sexual predators, provided by law enforcement groups.

Sexual predators are always a concern, she says, though she described the likelihood of a child being targeted by an adult with malicious intent as “statistically low.”

“Imagine a thousand children, 95 percent of whom have excellent typing skills, all typing at the same time,” she says. “Now try to monitor those conversations as they scroll past you on a screen.”

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Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real-time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has seamless access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content. Her teacher can track her progress over the course of a lesson plan and compare her performance and aptitudes across a lifelong “digital portfolio,” making note of areas that need additional attention through personalized assignments and alerting parents to specific concerns. What makes this possible is cyberlearning, the use of networked computing and communications technologies to support learning. Cyberlearning has the potential to transform education throughout a lifetime, enabling customized interaction with diverse learning materials on any topic—from anthropology to biochemistry to civil engineering to zoology. Learning does not stop with K–12 or higher education; cyberlearning supports continuous education at any age.

Welcome to Cyberbullying 2.0, the adult version of the meanest pastime on MySpace and Facebook. In recent years, the dangerous game has grown up and grown calculated.

ts consequences now include adult-sized miseries — dashed career opportunities, ruined professional relationships, crippling anxiety, even thoughts of suicide.

Rate My Professors, the online host of Bierman’s nemesis, now boasts more than eight million student-generated ratings of more than a million professors at 6,000 schools.

My question is why we keep putting so much of this discussion in the context of crime and victimization?" asked Anne Collier of ConnectSafely.org. "The vast majority of the behavior we're talking about is adolescent behavior and risk taking. It's not criminal behavior."

For years we've been telling parents to put the computer in the living room, keep and eye on what your children are doing, go and hit the history button and review where they've been," Balkam explained. "Well all that advice holds true but it gets completely upended by mobile phones, PDAs, and anything that can walk around."

A recent survey indicates that as of last year, 71 percent of teens 12 to 17 own a mobile phone (that's up from 45% in 2004). Eighty-seven percent of 17-year-olds and over half of children 12-13 years of age have one.