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| This is the best picture I could get, holding my camera phone out the window of my room, which faces into the hotel. Somewhere, down there, is a floating island with a piano on it. |
It’s going to be an interesting day, because I’m at the top of the education food chain. The National School Boards Association conducts an annual conference for the leadership of the various state affiliated organizations. These are the presidents, vice presidents, executive directors, and other leaders of the state school board associations.
What an opportunity, and what a unique morning — because I’m sharing the stage with Nancy Willard, of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use. It’s a point-counterpoint arrangement where it’s my job to present the rosie, “Isn’t this great?” stuff about the new web and the new information landscape, and she will provide the cautionary message about the problems, such as cyberbullying.
Of course my presentation will have its share of caution as will Nancy’s sharing many of the opportunities. But our goal is to start conversations that will hopefully spread out across the states and across to local SBEs and into every classroom.
I want to invite you to participate. If you would like to add to that conversation, please post a comment to this blog. I will be directing audience members here as well, to perhaps even share their reactions and insights.
It’s time to go down and find where this shindig is happening.
David , I wrote a post on this topic earlier this week. Here’s the URL: http://digitalmavericks.blogspot.com/2007/01/oh-wad-some-power-giftie-gie-us.html
I have found the Royal Canadian Mounted POlice program called ‘Missing’ one of the most engaging and exciting tools I have ever used with students. The fact it focusses on Internet Safety makes it of great value to all educationalists. We need to make students see that although it might be fun to post personal and risque content about themselves, there are consequences that might come as a result of their actions.
The ‘Tracking Theresa’ activity on http://www.netsmartz.org serves as a salutory lesson to us all about how easy it is track people down using a range of resources on the Internet.
The fact that I can use http://www.192.com to find phone numbers and addresses of people at the click of a button – it stores phone record and electoral roll details. I keep forgetting my brother’s telephone no. so I use 192.com as a way of finding it out. But the same site shows me who else lives in the same house as him and even how much he bought his house for (something he has never even told me). Another click takes me to a streetmap screen with an arrow pointing to the location of his house!
Pupils need to be educated about the dangers of personal information being revealed over the Internet as tools like these can be used by the sort of people we would not want to use them.
David;
I son’t know if you read my post “The Facts About Internet Sex Abuse”
http://preilly.wordpress.com/2006/12/27/the-facts-about-internet-sexual-abuse-and-schools/
There are some interesting statistics in the article that may help provide some context for this discussion. Context that is rarely present.
I know you’ll do well.
pete
I have a question: Is there more bullying on the playground or online? It would be interesting to know if online bullying has increased the total amount of bullying or decreased it. Any bullying is serious but I wonder what the trend actually is. Do we have any data that extends from before IM, MySpace, etc…???
I often see some kids who are completely silent in school become very strong defenders of students when they are writing in their class blogs. Interesting topic for psychologists and the like.