Wired Teens

Yesterday Guy Kawasaki over at the How to Change the World blog published an interview with Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online. The book is helpful for those trying to understand what teens do while online. The interview itself is a good primer on the subject; Goodstein makes some important points for not only parents, but also those of us in education. Of particular interest is what she has to say about banning social networking sites in school.

(photo credit: http://www.sxc.hu/pic/m/d/da/davdibiase/323533_surf_in_style.jpg)

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Technorati Tags: education | internet | Guy Kawasaki

Do Schools Have the Right to Stop Cyberbullying?: You Decide

Check out this article from The Wall Street Journal about how certain school districts are acting to stop cyberbullying. Do schools have the right to do this?

More on Video Games and Internet Safety

"It is by opening doors, not closing them that we create new possibilities for our children and new futures for ourselves."

An appropriate conclusion for a well argued piece from Pete Reilly called The Facts About Online Abuse and Schools. "How justified are our fears?" Reilly asks about the intense fear that schools have of exposing students to online predators. Using statistics on child and sexual abuse, he leads readers to believe that the walls we are erecting in our schools, due to these fears, need to be broken down.


Microsoft Vista, Gaming, and Parental Controls


From the NYTimes comes an article about the new safety features Microsoft is adding to its new operating system. For the first time, parents have "...powerful, easy-to-use, practically unhackable tools to control and monitor just about everything their children do with the home computer, online and off."



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More on Teens and the Internet

Internet safety has been a theme on this blog lately and two articles that I've read recently fit it perfectly--particularly the ways that teens are using the Internet. Below is a link and short description of each:

• A colleague sent me an article from Yahoo! News called Poll: 'IM-ing' divides teens, adults. A large part of the Internet safety program that we put on for parents at my school was dedicated to informing them of how teens use the Internet. The survey in the article, conducted by the AP and AOL, found that there was a major "instant messaging gap" between teens and adults.
• From The Christian Science Monitor comes Facebook: A Campus Fad becomes a Campus Fact. The article deals with how students on college campuses use Facebook and how the colleges have reacted. Although university students are the subjects of the article, there is much for K-12 educators to learn about the site.

Presenting an Internet Safety Program to Parents

It was two Tuesdays this past October when another teacher and I presented a program called the Wyoming Internet Safety Program for Parents. It was a pretty successful event--about 40 parents attended the first evening and I'd say that number increased to over 50 the second night. The feedback was very positive.

Planning for the event started at the end of the school year last year and continued through the summer with collaboration taking place on a Wikispaces wiki called Internet Safety for Parents. The wiki actually became a pretty good introduction to Internet safety as it combined the knowledge I was gaining by completing iSafe certification with the knowledge of my partner (who was already iSafe certified).

This post is for those thinking about planning an Internet safety program for their school community. Below are links to the various resources that we used in our program.

• WISPP Introduction - A link to the five slide introduction I created on Thumbstacks, a site for creating online presentations.
  
• WISPP Slideshow, Night 1 - Here is the whole slideshow from the first night that I uploaded to Slideshare. The slides are done in the Beyond Bullet Points format, so you won't get much information from them other than how we organized the presentation.
  
• Ryan Halligan Story - Ryan Halligan was a 7th grader who experienced cyberbullying so severe that he decided to committ suicide. iSafe has a video that we downloaded and showed. Check this site for information about Ryan and cyberbullying.
  
• Pew Internet & American Life Project - This site has lots of information about teen Internet usage that we used in our presentation.
  
• Netsmartz.org Blog Beware Quiz - I took a few questions from this quiz and added them to the slideshow.
  

More tips:

1. Include as many community groups that have an interest as possible. On the second night, we invited a counselor from the local youth services board to speak as well as some officers from the police department.
   
2. Keep it short--our program lasted two hours, but took place over two nights instead of two very long hours in one night.
   
3. Provide handouts.
   
4. Keep up the momentum (if done well, your program will have parents to use the information right away). Parents at our program were given the chance to sign up for a listserve. The goal of the listserve is for us to send along any resources that we come across.
   

More resources will be posted to misterteacher.com soon.


More Symmetry in Nature Resources

I have added some new information and more printables to the Symmetry in Nature page of my website. You can now learn about the symmetry of leaves and print some worksheets that require students to complete some engaging symmetry activities.


Technorati Tags: Internet Safety | wikis | teachers

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Internet Safety: Why Blogs Rule

This past Tuesday a fellow teacher and I presented the Wyoming Internet Safety Program for Parents. To get ready, I spent my summer completing the online training for iSafe certification. Throughout the modules one theme continued to surface: the key to keeping our kids safe online is erecting walls between them and contacts with predators. When predators can make contact with kids and develop a relationship with them, trouble follows.

There are two ways to keep them from kids: educating our students on intelligent use of the social Internet and providing them with safe access as well. It's the latter that I feel responsible for as a teacher who is determined to use the read/write web in my classroom.

Here are two tips for providing students with safe access to the Internet. Any social software that you plan to use in class should have the following:

1. Unpublished profiles, or no profiles at all, thus making it impossible to learn more about the student than his or her first username and maybe school.
2. A closed community of users making it impossible for outsiders to contact students and develop a relationship with them.
   

So how do blogs fit in here? Check out 21Publish and learn how to create a closed blog-based community. With 21Publish, you are the adminstrator and you control who can join and who can comment. You're the boss.

After my studies, I added some information to my community for parents to read on the safety of the site. You can read it in this post from my classroom blog.

Blogging | Internet Safety

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