Ad4dcss/Digital Citizenship

New study on the effects of instant messaging on reading comprehension. Students who send and receive instant messages while completing a reading assignment take longer to get through their texts but apparently still manage to understand what they're reading, according to one of the first studies to explore how the practice affects academic learning.

From email to social networking to classroom blogs, today's students are online, both in and out of school -- a lot. But there's no one out in cyberspace to make sure they wash behind their digital ears and refuse cookies from online strangers. Given this potentially dangerous void, schools will increasingly extend their supervisory reach, giving lessons at every grade level on netiquette -- call it Online Manners and Ethics 101.

The California legislature approved on Thursday a bill that prohibits texting while driving. Adult violators would be fined $20 for first offense and $50 for subsequent offenses.

Electronic Media and Youth Violence: A CDC Issue Brief for Educators and Caregivers focuses on the phenomena of electronic aggression. This document was developed for educators and caregivers. It summarizes what is known about young people and electronic aggression and discusses the implications of these findings for school staff, educational policy makers, and caregivers. You can download the full report at this site.

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.

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minnesota, took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents' bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell's school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was a "hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back." Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell's newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead.

The Authority & Responsibility of School Officials in Responding to Cyberbullying Article by Nancy Willard, M.S. J.D. [Journal of Adolescent Health 41 (2007) S64-S65]

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.

Cyberbullying experiences from a teen perspective.

Anne Collier recounts the saga of the Windsor High School teen who was recently singled out at a school assembly meant to warn students about the dangers of providing too much personal profile information on MySpace. She asks us for input on whether we think this is effective cybersafety training - or a form of public humiliation.

Cyberbullying is the practice of posting or sending harmful images or text via the Internet or other digital communication tools, such as cell phones, email, instant messaging, chat rooms, video game spaces or social networking environments such as My Space and Facebook. Following are some tips for parents and educators to help keep kids safe.

Ohio State Bar Association questions and answers on cyberbullying in the schools.

Have you ever been the victim of a bully? Ever stand silent and let a bully pick on someone? Most people wouldn't consider bullying a crime -- but it could be creating criminals right before our very eyes. A study from a group called Fight Crime: Invest in Kids concluded that nearly 60 percent of boys whom researchers classified as bullies in grades 6-9 were convicted of at least one crime by the age of 24. And get this, 40 percent of those same boys grew up to have three or more criminal convictions. In other words, today's bully could be tomorrow's criminal.

"In general, the networks connect novice teachers to others in their preparation classes, teachers who instruct in the same subject or grade level to one another, and teacher-mentors to colleagues-even when they are not located at the same schools. The sites facilitate online discussions, workshops, coaching, and collaborative study groups and work teams."

A malicious virus appears to have cracked the Facebook privacy firewalls and is sending thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of personal messages that appear to be from friend-to-friend, suggesting they are appearing in a YouTube video and providing the supposed link to view it.

Parents who worry that their children watch too much television can take heart: a bigger concern may be children spending too much time online. For children ages 10 to 14 who use the Internet, the computer is a bigger draw than the TV set, according to a study recently released by DoubleClick Performics, a search marketing company. The study found that 83 percent of Internet users in that age bracket spent an hour or more online a day, but only 68 percent devoted that much time to television.

Digital image that defines THEFT vs PIRACY vs FILE SHARING

Middle school children who have a television or computer in their room sleep less during the school year, watch more TV, play more computer games and surf the net more than their peers who don't - reveals joint research conducted by the University of Haifa and Jezreel Valley College.

Learn the latest about Adina's Deck, the award winning cybersafety film, which now has two additional sequels. The team is available for school assembly programs.