ABC World New Tonight just aired a television report on Sexting. As we wrote in this blog last month, the media has really started to shed a light on this teenage cell phone practice.
Educate your children, there are many consequences to Sexting. One consequence is the chance that the picture you send will be sent to other people in your school, or posted online for the world to see. Another consequence is that you could be arrested for the picture you receive on charges of possession of child pornography.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Some Social Networking in the News
There are many posts that I have been meaning to write about Social Networking for a little while now. Since I haven't been able to keep up with them, here are the articles that I wanted to share with a small synopsis about each.
Study of Risky Behavior of Teens on MySpace
The first article is about a study done by two doctors about risky behaviors exhibited by teenagers in MySpace. According to the results of the study, over half of the teenagers profiles contained mention of a risky behavior such as violence, substance abuse, or sexual activity. What I found most interesting, however, was the results of the follow up study. In the follow up study, one of the doctors sent a message to half of 190 of the teenagers that they found on MySpace who publicly displayed a risky behavior on their profile. The email to those teenagers warned tham about displaying that type of information online. As a result of the email, 42% of those teenagers withdrew references to their risky behaviors from their profiles. Educating students about the type of information they publicly display about themselves online is becoming more and more important.
Teen Sues Facebook and Ex-Classmates
This is an unfortunate, but all too familiar story about how social networks can be used as a tool to hurt other teenagers. A student from New York is suing former classmates for defamation over a Facebook page that was created about her. The Facebook page allegedly included defamatory statements about the teen and caused her much emotional distress. These types of online defamation lawsuits are increasing, but what makes this one particularly interesting is that Facebook is also being sued by the teen. It will be very interesting to follow this case and see if Facebook is held responsible for any of the content their users post about others.
Facebook Advice for Parents
This next resource is a blog post with some Facebook advice for parents. This blog posts raises an interesting question for parents, should you create a profile on the social network you child has a profile on to monitor them? I see two arguments, one being that these online spaces are for teenagers to talk, share, create and parents that go on them to keep tabs on their children are invading on privacy. The other argument is that it is a parent's responsibility to know what their child is posting online, what pictures and information they are making public, and who they are talking to. A good parent would monitor who their children's friends are in real life, right? This article provides some tips for those parents who want to become one of their child's online friends.
Cool Facebook Story
The next blog post offers a positive about using social networking. This is from David Warlick's blog, 2¢Worth, which is a great blog about educational technology integration. David's title to this blog post is "A Very Cool Story", to which I concur, it is a very cool story and demonstrates the enormous potential that social networking can have in gathering information and problem solving.
Study of Risky Behavior of Teens on MySpace
The first article is about a study done by two doctors about risky behaviors exhibited by teenagers in MySpace. According to the results of the study, over half of the teenagers profiles contained mention of a risky behavior such as violence, substance abuse, or sexual activity. What I found most interesting, however, was the results of the follow up study. In the follow up study, one of the doctors sent a message to half of 190 of the teenagers that they found on MySpace who publicly displayed a risky behavior on their profile. The email to those teenagers warned tham about displaying that type of information online. As a result of the email, 42% of those teenagers withdrew references to their risky behaviors from their profiles. Educating students about the type of information they publicly display about themselves online is becoming more and more important.
Teen Sues Facebook and Ex-Classmates
This is an unfortunate, but all too familiar story about how social networks can be used as a tool to hurt other teenagers. A student from New York is suing former classmates for defamation over a Facebook page that was created about her. The Facebook page allegedly included defamatory statements about the teen and caused her much emotional distress. These types of online defamation lawsuits are increasing, but what makes this one particularly interesting is that Facebook is also being sued by the teen. It will be very interesting to follow this case and see if Facebook is held responsible for any of the content their users post about others.
Facebook Advice for Parents
This next resource is a blog post with some Facebook advice for parents. This blog posts raises an interesting question for parents, should you create a profile on the social network you child has a profile on to monitor them? I see two arguments, one being that these online spaces are for teenagers to talk, share, create and parents that go on them to keep tabs on their children are invading on privacy. The other argument is that it is a parent's responsibility to know what their child is posting online, what pictures and information they are making public, and who they are talking to. A good parent would monitor who their children's friends are in real life, right? This article provides some tips for those parents who want to become one of their child's online friends.
Cool Facebook Story
The next blog post offers a positive about using social networking. This is from David Warlick's blog, 2¢Worth, which is a great blog about educational technology integration. David's title to this blog post is "A Very Cool Story", to which I concur, it is a very cool story and demonstrates the enormous potential that social networking can have in gathering information and problem solving.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Cyber Safety at the King Middle School
Representatives from the Boston Public Schools Office of Instructional and Information Technology were invited to present to students at the Martin Luther King Middle School today. OIIT was asked to educate about six classrooms of students about internet safety as a part of the King School Health Day. BPS Cyber Safety Campaign coordinator, Felicia Vargas, as well as Eric Esteves and Haruna Tada from Tech Boston put together a 40 minute presentation for the students about different topics of internet safety. The students first watched a short movie about internet safety called Jake's Cyber Adventure, written by and starring BPS High School students. After the movie, they led the students in a discussion and an activity about cyberbullying, cybersecurity, and online personal safety. The activity was a ten question quiz that used eInstruction classroom performance systems (clickers) to engage all of the students in the important discussion. I was not surprised that a large portion of these middle school students were very tech saavy and knew a lot about what we were discussing. It was also nice to connect with the students, hopefully we gave them some strategies to take away from the session today that will keep them a little safer while online.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Kilmer Students Finalists in State Poster Contest!
I just received this email from Elaine McCabe over at the Joyce Kilmer Upper School:
I am very happy to announce that two of our fifth grade Upper School Kilmer students are semi-finalists in the 2009 State of Massachusetts Kids Safe Online Cyber Security Poster contest. In order for one of our Kilmer students to win, friends and family must vote electronically for the poster. The numbers you may want to consider in your voting process are Poster No. 33 or Poster No. 34. The poster with the highest votes will win a meeting and lunch with Governor Deval Patrick and that poster will be placed on the Massachusetts Cyber Website. Please forward this email to other interested individuals as we would like the Kilmer to be recognized for the great work that our students are producing on a daily basis. Be aware, one vote per person or email address. I have attached the email from the State with the link to view the posters and vote. IF YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO VOTE THROUGH THE STATE LINK, forward this email to your home address and please try it from there.
Thank you for your interest and support of our students
Congratulations to those two students and to all of the students at the Kilmer School who participated in the statewide internet safety poster contest!
Click here to vote for your favorite poster!
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Do You Know What Your Children are Texting?
As always, we adults are behind on the latest trends. The following trend is not new to students, it is just beginning to gain attention through the media. The trend is called “sexting” and it is when a person takes an inappropriate picture of themselves and texts someone with it. A lot of the articles I have read about this involve young teenage girls sending nude photos of themselves to boyfriends, or boys they like. Unfortunately, in some cases (or a lot of cases, depending on who you talk to) the pictures get passed on and sent to other students. A number of these situations have surfaced lately in schools both locally and nationally. ABC News.com has an article that explains what sexting is with some example cases. Police are arresting offenders for distribution of child pornography in some of these cases. In the article, Maris Nightingale makes a very important point saying that "it's crucial parents talk to their children about potential consequences, because while criminal charges are rare, compromising photos could easily come back to haunt the teens when they go to apply for college or their first job." Eric Esteves of TechBoston also sent along a Boston Herald article that asked a really good question. Do teens really think it is a big deal to send these types of pictures to each other?
Maybe we should ask them...
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Julie Amero Interview on Good Morning America
The Julie Amero story has gained much national attention over the last few years. Julie was the substitute teacher from Connecticut who was convicted of child endangerment after pop-up windows containing pornographic material were visible on the computer in the classroom in which she was substituting for the day. Eventually, the conviction was overturned after it was proven that the culprit was spyware on the computer. Recently, Julie and her husband told their story of the experience to Robin Roberts of Good Morning America. The six minute interview is definitely worth watching.
The BPS does have filtering software in place to block pornographic sites, but no software is 100% effective. If your classroom computer is infected with malware (a virus, spyware, trojan horse, etc...), you could be putting your students and your files at risk. Make sure that the anti-virus software is up to date by having your TST run the login procedure that will update your desktop computer. If your TST does not know what the login procedure is to run an antivirus update, have them call the help desk. If you want to make sure that your L4L MacBook software is up to date, see the following video tutorial.
The BPS does have filtering software in place to block pornographic sites, but no software is 100% effective. If your classroom computer is infected with malware (a virus, spyware, trojan horse, etc...), you could be putting your students and your files at risk. Make sure that the anti-virus software is up to date by having your TST run the login procedure that will update your desktop computer. If your TST does not know what the login procedure is to run an antivirus update, have them call the help desk. If you want to make sure that your L4L MacBook software is up to date, see the following video tutorial.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
The Threat of Online Predators?
By now, you may have heard about the internet safety report by a task force commissioned by 49 State Attorney Generals that has called online predator threats to children as overblown. If you haven't here is a quick synopsis:
As part of an agreement last year with MySpace, FaceBook and other social networking companies, an internet safety task force was created in conjunction with 49 Attorney Generals from across the United States. The Internet Safety task force from Harvard University, commissioned by the Attorney Generals, released the result of its study earlier this month in which concluded that the problem of bullying online and offline poses a more serious problem than sexual solicitation of minors online. This is in line with the results of a report published by the University of New Hampshire last year, which came up with the same conclusion. Both reports eschew the stereotype of the adult online predator that poses as a teenager to trick other teenagers into meeting them and then attacking them. Most scientific data of online sexual predators shows that children are unlikely to be sexually propositioned online by adults. Those that are, usually are willing participants in the conversations and tend to be more at risk teenagers who suffer from poor home environments, depression and severe self esteem issues. However, there are lots of teenagers who have poor home environments, and have low self esteem issues who are groomed and taken advantage of by online predators. Does this report downplay these threats? Some Attorney Generals think so, notably Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett. Attorney General Corbett has called the report misleading adding that the threat of internet predators is "real" and that his office has 183 internet predators in the last four years.
Now to add to the argument, the Center For Safe and Responsible Internet Use has issued a study in response to Attorney General Corbett's statements about the 183 arrests. Upon analyzing the 183 cases the Center For Safe and Responsible Internet Use found:
The entire report can be read here http://csriu.org/PDFs/papredator.pdf
No one denies the fact that their are bad people online that wish to do harm to children, but the reports suggest that it isn't the widespread threat that it has been believed to be in the past. A teenage internet user is much more susceptible to falling victim to cyber bullying, online identity theft or installing malware on their computer than being stalked by a sexual predator. However, should law enforcement, parents, or teenagers be any less vigilant about online predators because of these reports? That is the question...
As part of an agreement last year with MySpace, FaceBook and other social networking companies, an internet safety task force was created in conjunction with 49 Attorney Generals from across the United States. The Internet Safety task force from Harvard University, commissioned by the Attorney Generals, released the result of its study earlier this month in which concluded that the problem of bullying online and offline poses a more serious problem than sexual solicitation of minors online. This is in line with the results of a report published by the University of New Hampshire last year, which came up with the same conclusion. Both reports eschew the stereotype of the adult online predator that poses as a teenager to trick other teenagers into meeting them and then attacking them. Most scientific data of online sexual predators shows that children are unlikely to be sexually propositioned online by adults. Those that are, usually are willing participants in the conversations and tend to be more at risk teenagers who suffer from poor home environments, depression and severe self esteem issues. However, there are lots of teenagers who have poor home environments, and have low self esteem issues who are groomed and taken advantage of by online predators. Does this report downplay these threats? Some Attorney Generals think so, notably Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett. Attorney General Corbett has called the report misleading adding that the threat of internet predators is "real" and that his office has 183 internet predators in the last four years.
Now to add to the argument, the Center For Safe and Responsible Internet Use has issued a study in response to Attorney General Corbett's statements about the 183 arrests. Upon analyzing the 183 cases the Center For Safe and Responsible Internet Use found:
- Only 8 incidents involved actual teen victims with whom the Internet was used to form a relationship.7
- In 4 of these incidents, teens or parents reported the contact. The other 4 cases were discovered in an analysis of the computer files of a predator who had been arrested in a sting operation. Five of the cases had led to inappropriate sexual contact. The other situations were discovered prior to any actual contact.
- There were 166 arrests as a result of sting activities where the predator contacted an undercover agent who was posing as a 12 - 14 year old, generally a girl.
- The vast majority of the stings, 144, occurred in chat rooms. Eleven stings occurred through instant messaging.
- There were only 12 reports of predators being deceptive about their age.
The entire report can be read here http://csriu.org/PDFs/papredator.pdf
No one denies the fact that their are bad people online that wish to do harm to children, but the reports suggest that it isn't the widespread threat that it has been believed to be in the past. A teenage internet user is much more susceptible to falling victim to cyber bullying, online identity theft or installing malware on their computer than being stalked by a sexual predator. However, should law enforcement, parents, or teenagers be any less vigilant about online predators because of these reports? That is the question...
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