Ad4dcss/Digital Citizenship

We should talk to Darren and perhaps join in with some things he is doing with open PD. This is a great opportunity for organizations to learn more about the newest technologies.

Open professional development by Darren Draper and Friends. These opportunities will let you open up your classroom and join in with others to learn collaboratively about blogs, wikis, and more. Take a look at it.

Think.com's safety lesson with nets standards. Think.com is excellent to use with younger students and is very walled and has an excellent profanity filter. I highly recommend it and have personally used it for a summer blogging project. Excellent site. It also requires an extensive verification process by the participating schools.

Excellent lesson plan and activities from think.com for teaching digital citizenship, particularly safety and netiquette.

In recognition of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, LOOKBOTHWAYS and CyberPatrol have created four family-oriented Internet safety videos that give parents, educators and others, quick and accessible advice on how to protect children online.

To decrease a child's risk of sexual exploitation in every environment, there are several steps parents and caregivers should take:

As teens across the country head back to school this year, far too many of them are facing the entrance doors to their schools with feelings of fear, trepidation and dread. For an increasing number of students across the nation, schooldays are filled with the never-ending cycle of taunting and abuse from their bullies. But this year, in an unprecedented display of solidarity, thousands of strangers who have been through the same harrowing experiences, are sharing their private tales of torment with these teens for the first time ever because of the story of Olivia Gardner.

Olivia Gardner, a northern California teenager, was severely taunted and cyber-bullied by her classmates for more than two years. News of her bullying spread, eventually reaching two teenage girls from a neighboring town, sisters Emily and Sarah Buder. The girls were so moved by Olivia's story that they initiated a letter-writing campaign to help lift her spirits. It was a tender gesture of solidarity that set off an overwhelming chain reaction of support, encouragement, and love. In Letters to a Bullied Girl, Olivia and the Buder sisters share an inspiring selection of messages that arrived from across America-the personal, often painful remembrances of former targets, remorseful bullies, and sympathetic bystanders. Letters to a Bullied Girl examines our national bullying epidemic from a variety of angles and perspectives, and includes practical guidance from bullying expert Barbara Coloroso, author of The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander. Though addressed to Olivia, the letters speak to all young people who have been bullied, offer advice and hope to those who suffer, and provide a wake-up call to all who have ever been involved in bullying.

There is also a video interview with the Buder sisters on this site.

Sarah and Emily Buder talk about why they started the Olivia's letters project and where it's taken them.

We hear so much in the news about teen meanness and harassment toward each other online that it's quite amazing to find a national story about kindness. In the case of Olivia Gardner, the kindness came from two sisters in a nearby town, Sarah and Emily Buder in Mill Valley, Calif., who read in the newspaper about how Olivia was being bullied and wanted to help.

An impulse to help a Marin girl who had been bullied by her classmates has transformed the lives of two Mill Valley sisters and led to a paperback book being sold nationwide. Two years ago, sisters Emily, 18, and Sarah Buder, 15, read a newspaper story about the plight of Olivia Gardner, a then 13-year-old Novato girl who had been ridiculed by her classmates and subjected to an "Olivia Haters" Web site that drove her to change schools three times and eventually to drop out of school altogether.

They came from pretty much every sector-nonprofits, government, wireless executives, and think tanks-to a day-long conference in Washington D.C. on how to respond to the panic du jour over kids, mobile phones, and sex

U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez is proposing a federal grant program to research and educate children about Internet safety. Menedez, D-N.J., said he is hopeful that educating teenagers, teachers and parents will stop children from sending explicit photos of themselves over cell phones and the Internet. The grant proposal would authorize $25 million to $35 million each year for Internet safety programs. The grants would be awarded on a two-year basis and administered by the Department of Justice.

Now comes new details about the parental control system coming to the App Store. All iPhone applications will be rated in one of four age categories: 4+, 9+, 12+, or 17+. When Apple announced the coming 3.0 release of its iPhone software, it referred to parental controls for apps.

This Web Wise Kids cell phone safety program for middle school children is titled It's Your Call. Based on true stories, it is an interactive game that allows users to play out difficult situations in the safety of cyberspace before they live them out in real life. The game offers teens guidance about responsible cell phone behaviors and how to use these devices to enhance their personal safety. Players become a live action character in an interactive movie and are presented with a series of difficult decisions in a slice-of-life context. The teens must make tough decisions and view the consequences of their actions in the video.

These go with the growing up online series.

Bookmarks from the growing up online series for parents. These are links to the major websites for online safety.

This team of 6th graders captured 2nd place honors in the 2007 annual ThinkQuest competition for their entry, "Internet Safety, Keeping It Real." Topics covered include predators, cyberbullying and online safety. Although it does lean a little heavy on the side of fear-mongering, this was an excellent effort by a team of kids!

MISSING, from Web Wise Kids, is designed to SHOW rather than TELL children about online safety. It's a fun and positive way to teach children how to avoid danger on the Internet. The interactive software adventure tells the story of Zack, a kid in Vancouver, Canada who forms an online friendship with Fantasma. This guy is so cool - he has an online magazine about beach life in California and he sends Zack great stuff, like graphic arts and software. Little does Zack know that he is a predator. After Zach agrees to go to San Diego to be with Fantasma, players work with a detective to find and rescue Zack and arrest Fantasma. Available both as a home edition and a school edition. [Windows and Mac OSX versions available]. Note: Local middle school science teachers have successfully worked this program into their science curriculum since solving the game involves researching and collecting clues.

Simulation lesson plan. Students rent apartments, get jobs, buy a car etc., use the Internet to gather information and complete the associated math assignments.

The FBI-SOS Internet Challenge is an internet safety program designed to help students recognize potential dangers associated with the internet, email, chat rooms and social networking sites. The program addresses and defines topics serious in nature such as seduction, child pornography, solicitation, exploitation, obscenity and online predators. Students take web-based quizzes and review specific web sites aimed at promoting online safety.

Freeplay Music Library, is a comprehensive collection of High End Broadcast production music spanning all the popular musical genres, available for download either on-line or via Portable Hard Drive