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The director of the White House war on drugs said on Monday that Internet videos that show people getting high pose a dangerous threat to teenagers by encouraging them to use drugs and alcohol.

"Parents would be horrified to think that people are sneaking into their house to encourage their kids to build a bong or to chug on beer at age 13," Walters said. "The fact is those people are sneaking into your house through your Internet connection on your computer," he said.

adult offenders who meet, develop relationships with, and openly seduce underage teenagers

The publicity about online"predators" who prey on naive children using trickery and violence is largely inaccurate.

In the great majority of cases, victims are aware they are conversing online with adults. In the N-JOV Study, only 5% of offenders pretended to be teens when they met potential victims online. (112)

essential learning tools that every 21st century learner should have.

Miguel Guhlin

use your blog as your "backup brain"

To refuse to try, to stick (97) blindly to tradition, because the search for the truth involves experimentation in the region of the unknown, is to refuse the only step which can introduce rational conviction into education.

It should also be stated that practically it has not as yet been possible, in many cases, to act adequately upon the best ideas obtained, because of administrative difficulties, due to lack of funds —difficulties centering in the lack of a proper building and appliances, and in inability to pay the amounts necessary to secure the complete time of teachers in some important lines. Indeed, with the growth of the school in numbers, and in the age and maturity of pupils, it is becoming a grave question how long it is fair to the experiment to carry it on without more adequate facilities.

The aim, then, is not for the child to go to school as a place apart, but rather in the school so to recapitulate typical phases of his experience outside of school, as to enlarge, enrich, and gradually formulate it.

SmallWorlds is a 3D virtual world that runs inside your web browser. It enables you to build your own room, house, or even your own world, and fill it with a wide variety of items and fun activities.

At the end of an hour we saw a far-away town sleeping in a valley by a winding river; and beyond it on a hill, a vast gray fortress, with towers and turrets, the first I had ever seen out of a picture. ``Bridgeport?'' said I, pointing. ``Camelot,'' said he.

Brown's class was discussing some of the whaling calculations in Moby Dick. When one student asked a question involving a complex computation, three students quickly pulled out their cell phones and did the math. Brown was surprised to learn that most cell phones have a built-in calculator. She was even more surprised at how literate her students were with the many functions included in their phones. She took a quick poll and found that all her students either had a cell phone or easy access to one. In fact, students became genuinely engaged in a class discussion about phone features. This got Brown thinking about how she might incorporate this technology into learning activities.

Brown noticed that many students used text messaging to communicate, and considered how she might use cell phones in summarizing and analyzing text to help her students better understand Richard III. Effective summarizing is one of the most powerful skills students can cultivate. It provides students with tools for identifying the most important aspects of what they are learning, especially when teachers use a frame of reference (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Summarizing helps students identify critical information. Research shows gains in reading comprehension when students learn how to incorporate isummary framesi (series of questions designed to highlight critical passages) as a tool for summarizing (Meyer & Freedle, 1984). When students use this strategy, they are better able to understand what they are reading, identify key information, and provide a summary that helps them retain the information (Armbruster, Anderson, & Ostertag, 1987).

To manage the learning project, Brown asked a tech-savvy colleague to help her build a simple weblog. Once it was set up, it took Brown and her students 10 minutes in the school's computer lab to learn how to post entries. The weblog was intentionally basic. The only entries were selected passages from text of Richard III and Brown's six narrative-framing questions. Her questions deliberately focused students' attention on key passages. If students could understand these passages well enough to summarize them, Brown knew that their comprehension of the play would increase.

They see the broad difference between the two as being the amount of self-determination or self-direction; with cooperative learning being very much teacher-controlled and collaborative learning being learner-controlled.

However, experientially I believe that what distinguishes collaboration from cooperation comes down to exactly what is shared. When cooperating, it is only physical resources (objects, time, money) or intellectual resources (knowledge, expertise) that are shared. Whereas when collaborating, in addition to these shared physical and intellectual resources, are shared goals, responsibilities, values, beliefs and attitudes. Some of these intellectual resources (both cognitive and affective) may become shared through the practice of cooperation but with collaboration they are factored in from the start. From this collaborative sharing comes synergy which adds value by producing something new and unique.

There is another important area that needs to be addressed with collaborative learning software which is related to communication; namely knowledge construction. It has been noted by researches that threaded discourse, of the type found in Lotus Notes and the majority Web-based conferencing software, actually works against convergent thinking processes over time (Hiltz, 1986; Harassim, 1990; Eastmond, 1994). It is found that this can have "a negative effect both on the learner's efforts to synthesize ideas, and on collaborative processes which become increasingly fragmented as discussion threads and individual interests diverge." (Hewitt, 1997).

I believe there is something very powerful  in this tool. I am in the process evaluating it for instructional and professional development purposes. So far these are my thoughts: I think I can easily mark up online student work with this tool. I think online students can mark up each other’s online work with this tool. and discuss. One of the course activities is to use a rubric to evaluate an online course that the students will each be building as the main project for the course. The course review, I think, can be done using diigo. I think… not sure yet. Online students can easily create annotated bibliographies of web resource in directed learning activities AND share and discuss them with others in the class. This resource can grow and be available for the online course from term to term. In addition, for webenhanced courses, this is an awesome, easy, slick, cool way to incorporate some very cool online enhancements to a f2f course that completely bypasses all the extra unnecessary flotsam you get with a full on CMS/LMS. you get a lot of functional features bang for the “buck” in this tool. It is a slick tool with a lot of functionality to suport interaction/collaboration, etc. When i have my university administrator’s hat on i also see great potential as a tool to facilitate and enhance community and for professional development. I have an extended staff of 50-100 online instructional designers that i could use this tool with to aggregate links and info and resources and networking. We have over 3,000 online faculty that we could use this with to support them with info and resources and networking - differenciating between the needs of new online faculty and experienced online faculty… there is potential for discipline specific resources and info for online faculty… and it goes on.

In March, 2008, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) launched a new initiative dedicated to helping superintendents, aspiring superintendents and district leadership teams build their knowledge, skills and confidence as effective technology leaders.

Lisa Parisi This morning I came here before I went to twitter. This seems to be the place to be right now. Still not sure of all the groupings, taggings, etc. Reading what everyone writes and hoping to get it soon

Will play on Sunday with Karen McMillan and Alice Barr. Anyone else want to join? Anyone want to teach?

Kristin Hokanson Liz I think it may be too much ially for the newbie and I will continue to send to delicious.

But I recently read something, somewhere that diigo had a new improved tool bar and started to read up on the other Diigo features including the ablility for messaging, creating lists of bookmarks, the ability to turn bookmarks into slideshows, tagrolls and linkrolls, a Firefox sidebar, a Facebook application, blog integration

I have presented del.icio.us at LEAST a dozen times to large audiences.