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For the home user, however, password safety requires more than on-the-fly thinking. Pacheco suggests a system built around a main word for all instances. The distinction is that the name of the site is added somewhere. For example, if the main word is "eggplant," the password might be "eggyyplant" Yahoo, "eggplantgg" for Google or "wleggplant" for Windows Live. He suggests listing the variations in an Excel spreadsheet.

Password security is a big deal, and if you don't think it is, then someone might be hacking into your computer even as you read this. A strong password isn't foolproof, but it proves that you're no fool. And it might protect you from compromised data, a broken computer or identity theft. Your bank account, your personal e-mails and lots of other stuff are at risk with weak passwords.

"A good password is the most important part of Internet security," said Robert Pacheco, the owner of Computer Techs of San Antonio. "It's the beginning and end of the issue. You can't stop it (hacking). You do what you can do to prevent it. You just try to stop most of it." A strong firewall, as well as spyware -- and virus-detection software -- protect a computer's so-called "back door," Pacheco said, where a hacker can gain access through various cyber threats. Those threats include infected e-mail attachments; phishing Web pages that exploit browser flaws; downloaded songs or pictures with hidden trojans; or plain ol' poking-and-prodding of a computer's shields. But passwords protect information from a frontal assault by way of the computer's keyboard.

I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world -- just like they do on Facebook or MySpace -- and the kids will learn. There's a fallacy there, and my experience with how much really deep teaching of digital ethics we've had to do at SLA to counter all that the kids come in the door thinking about the digital world.

is there much of an honest discussion of just how hard implementation of these ideas actually is.

And the problem is that our entire structure has to change to make it easier. You can't teach 150 kids a day this way... you can't have traditional credit hours... you have to find new ways to look at your classroom. Everything from school design to teacher contracts to class size and teacher load to curriculum and assessment -- everything we do in schools -- has to be on the table for change if we are to achieve the kind of schools that video is speaking about. The only thing that shouldn't be on the table, and that the video actually hints that it should be, is the need for teachers in their day to day lives-- the adults who can make a deep profound impact in kids' lives.