Filtering

I'm working on my "computer safety" lessons for the upcoming year and found this article by Justin Reich helpful in organizing my thoughts. He talks about the failure of filtering in our schools and that our money should be spent on educating the kids in the following areas:

• Safegaurding personal information
• Cyber-bullying
• Dealing with advances from strangers
• Avoiding online scams
• Courteous online communication

Then monitor the kids an make them accountable for their online behavior.

Each of these bullet points will be a lesson plan in my classes this year. Nice way to break it up into units.


[via 2¢ Worth]

[Image: "No tresspasing":Uploaded on February 12, 2008 by diankarl (www.diankarlina.com): Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/diankarl/2261139983/ (Creative Commons License Deed Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic)]

What is a browser?

What is a Browser?

When I ask my high school students this question, the number one answer I get is "Google". Somewhere in the past six years or so most ordinary folks have stopped thinking about the browser. Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer don't mean much to most of my students.

This short film asks the same question "man on the street" style and gets pretty much the same answers I get in the classroom. I think this reflects better designed browsers. We are more concerned with the results. Like a good tool, they start to fade into the background. Unless they stop working.

[Image captured from the video: What is a browser?]

History of the Internet

I was looking for a simple, straight forward history of the internet I could use in my classroom. I haven't found the perfect video/article yet but this little film comes close. I liked it. I learned a few things.

My only concern is that I think it will lose a lot of my students. It may be just a tad too technical for some of my freshmen web students?

Take a look and see what you think.


History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

I'll give it a shot with a couple of my classes and see how they respond.

[via OpenCulture]


[Image: Captured from the video:History of the Internet]

Google Docs Blocked

I was in a near by school district recently for a workshop. It was being held in a high school computer lab and when we broke to do our first assignment, I immediately went to Google Docs. I figured I could start the project in the class and then quickly pick up where I left off at home.

Except the district blocks Google Docs.

This lab was locked down tight. I couldn't use a thumb drive. I couldn't get to several sites I normally use every day. Other teachers couldn't access their school sites to grab information needed for the class. The instructor was at a loss at how to get her assignments from her portable drive to us through this school network. IT was called but it was a late night class and I'm pretty sure we were a low priority. Finally, someone suggested a proxy server to allow us to reach our email accounts. I'm sure it broke many school rules to use a proxy but it allowed us to continue on with our class.

I imagine this is the kind of wall of frustration many of our students hit when they try to work at school in the same way they work at home. We teachers resorted to the same thing that many of them do. Work around the system.

I was helping a student the other day in my school who was trying to grab some pictures he had stored on PhotoBucket which is blocked in my district. As soon as he discovered it was blocked, he pulled out his internet ready phone and went to the site where he then emailed the pictures to himself. He's not going to stop using Photobucket, he just is going to adjust his work flow.

I worry at the message we are sending our kids. I also struggle with trying to figure the right balance between protection and paranoia. Don't know the answer yet, but I am working on it.

[Original Image captured from http://www.apple.com/iphone/gallery/ and then altered in photoshp]

Thirty One Online Applications

Ran across this link to "The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education" on Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… He has a list of thirty-one free online applications that could be used by your students and/or yourself. There is a brief write up on each application and I didn't see one that I'm not planning on checking out. I was going to write about a couple to fill out my weeks worth of posts but there is too much here to hoard. If you are like me and still trying to flesh out your lessons for this first semester, this might be the place to find an idea or two. Or just possibly thirty-one!

I often think that I am more aware than the average web-head of a lot that's available out there in cyberspace and then I find a resource like this where I discover I am just a babe in the woods playing with twigs while there are lumberjacks out there harvesting lodge pole pines. I may have to just send my wife packing so I can spend more time searching and surfing the internet. Or... I could keep the wife, learn to be satisfied gathering sticks and just add this blog to my RSS feed?

Image: Flickr: "She's Leaving Home": Uploaded on August 7, 2006 by Thomas Hawk: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/208990544/((CC)Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic)

UK online safety study

Ars Techica had a post about a recent British study that is "an independent review of how parents and children are being affected by the rise of new technology." I particularly like the following analogy. Byron, the author of the study, suggests that parents should treat technology as they do more traditional areas of childhood development, and makes two informative comparisons: crossing the street and learning to swim. Each of these is associated with risks, but parents manage them in stages, with education, followed by supervised exploration that ultimately leads to allowing children to explore largely unsupervised. Technology largely presents a problem because it lacks the intuitive and widely understood aspects of education and risk.

The full text of the article is available here.

[Image:Flickr: maveric2003:Eric Chan: "Kids on a rope"; http://www.flickr.com/photos/maveric2003/833326910/]

Google on Internet Safety

The Google Blog had a post last week on internet safety with a variety of links. I've included a video they created in partnership with Common Sense Media here that is featured on that posting. If you are looking for some safety related sites you can share with parents or colleagues, this might be helpful.







[Image created in Photoshop. Quote is from a character on the TV show "Hill Street Blues" that aired in the 1980's]

Kevin Kelly: Better Than Free

Kevin Kelly has an interesting piece on The Technium called Better than Free. His premise is that anything that can be copied can be put on the internet. Once it is on the internet it becomes available to anyone for free. Money can't be made from the original item in this new electronic landscape. Money can only be made from things that can't be copied. Here was the interesting part of the article for me. He gives eight possible ways that marketable value can be added. Eight things that can't be copied that are valuable to the consumer. I won't explain what he says, read the article. It's worth it.

In these changing times as major studios are trying desperately to hang onto an outdated business model that doesn't work in this new digital world, we seem to hear from the two extreme camps. "Pay me cause it's mine" or "I can get it for free and you can't stop me." It is nice to read a thoughtful piece that looks at how things might work out.

Good discussion article for the tech classroom. Good debate topic for a social studies classroom. I've already seen this mentioned on three other blogs I follow. It is going to generate a lot of discussion.

[Image: Captured from The Technium: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php]