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Last month, district officials investigated an e-mail from an unidentified "concerned parent" that included pictures of a woman clad in only a bra and underwear. The photo allegedly was taken from a Sunrise Elementary teacher's MySpace page. The teacher was not identified, and the photos did not show the woman's face.

"Teachers are role models, and they don't stop when school gets out," said Credle, whose daughter attends Lockmar Elementary in Palm Bay. "If you don't want people to see it, why post it? Odds are it's going to get out."

Parents can augment or even replace their children's traditional school experience with programs from companies like K-12.  This service allows parents to enroll children in virtual schools or purchase specific curriculum.  Traditional materials—worksheets, books, and other physical materials—are combined with online resources, including multimedia presentations. 

If We Can Change the Way We Communicate, We Can Change the Way We Educate

Steve Jobs' passing last week encouraged Americans to consider how technology has transformed our lives.  Fueled by the creative genius of men like Jobs, new technology has emerged allowing us to better keep in touch with friends and family, access entertainment and information, and perform work from home or wherever we happen to be at that moment.  While we've successfully integrated technology into our workplaces and personal lives, we've been comparatively slow to apply technology's power to other areas of life, like education.  That needs to change.

Perhaps more disconcerting is that 54 percent of young people think it’s OK to use discriminatory words within their own circle of friends, because “I know we don’t mean it.

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And if we didn’t have all these social networks out there — the Facebook, you know, and the Internet in general — that is where a lot of the bullying occurs

The use of technology has also been beneficial for individuals with disabilities. I have personal knowledge of a young man with A.L.S. who slowly lost his ability to communicate verbally and used the computer as a communication tool. Later as the disease progressed he utilized additional technology which allowed him to use his eye movement as a type of input device.

The class listened as Mr. Jenkins read a story about a girl who got annoyed when her parents quizzed her about details from her online journal. Lucas Navarrete, 13, asked, “What’s their right to read her personal stuff?” “Maybe they’re worried,” suggested Morgan Windham, a soft-spoken girl. “It’s public!” argued Aren Santos. “O.K., O.K., if it was a personal diary and they read it, would you be happy?” Lucas asked. “They have no right, see?” Mr. Jenkins asked the class if there is a difference between a private diary on paper and a public online diary. But the class could not agree. “I would just keep it to myself and tell only people that were really, really close to me,” Cindy Nguyen said after class. “We want to have our personal, private space.” That blurred line between public and private space is what Common Sense tries to address. “That sense of invulnerability that high school students tend to have, thinking they can control everything, before the Internet there may have been some truth to that,” said Ted Brodheim, chief information officer for the New York City Department of Education. “I don’t think they fully grasp that when they make some of these decisions, it’s not something they can pull back from.”

And the Internet is where children are growing up. The average young person spends seven and a half hours a day with a computer, television or smart phone, according to a January study from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Considering that the time is mostly outside of school, the results suggest that almost every extracurricular hour is devo

“You want to light a fire under someone’s fanny?” said Liz Perle, editor in chief of Common Sense Media. “Have your child post something that is close to a hate crime.”

“The messes they get into with friends, or jumping onto someone’s site and sending a message,” she said. “They don’t know, sometimes, how to manage the social, emotional stuff that comes up.”