Delete Cyberbullying!

CableVision’s Power to Learn introduces its year-long initiative: DELETE CYBERBULLYING. The project is created in partnership with regional Boys & Girls Clubs, Cartoon Networks’ Stop Bullying, Speak Up and Common Sense Media. You won’t want to miss the resources available for teachers, parents, and students. These include online resources such as an interactive case study and materials for teachers and parents, anti-cyberbullying tips, a pledge to encourage students to stand up against bullying, Boys & Girls’ Clubs town hall sessions, a contest for local students in Grades 4-11, and the booklet, “What Parents Need to Know about Cyberbullying.” All free. All right at our fingertips.

Favorite iPhone (and iPad) Apps

The iPhone Atlas folks have pointed out their favorite iPhone apps for the year and while there are no games on it and it is a short list, there are some very useful items. Try Bluefire Reader that lets you read books checked out from your  “local" library--free of charge. If you believe that e-books are overpriced, and that has been holding you back from getting a table like an iPad, this may be your solution. Word Lens uses the iPhone’s camera to do translations. Point it at a foreign-language sign, menu, book, or whatever, and Word Lens instantly overlays an English translation.

Smurf’s Village Adds a Warning Label

We wrote here recently about how easy it was for kids to spend as much as $100 playing the popular "The Smurfs' Village" game for the iPhone and iPad. Now the publisher has added a warning that these virtual items such as “Smurfberries” cost real money, a heads up to parents some of whom have been surprised to find charges on their credit cards. Usually, the purchases require the owner of the device to enter his or her iTunes password. But there is no password challenge if the owner has entered the password in the last 15 minutes, for any reason. That means that if a parent enters the password for a purchase or a free app upgrade, then hands the phone or iPad over to their child, the child will not be stopped by a password prompt.

Parents Find Internet Use and Watching TV Similar

As the Internet and television begin to converge, parents are using the restriction of  access to both as a form of punishment according to the results of a survey. The survey done in April 2010 by the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future found that two-thirds of parents say they restrict their kids' access to TV as punishment, a number that has barely budged over the past 10 years. But the percentage of parents who limit Internet access as a form of punishment has nearly doubled in the last decade. Among parents surveyed this spring, 57% said they withheld Web access to punish their kids. That is up from 32% in 2000.

Even so, parents are still more comfortable with the amount of time kids spend on the Internet — 71% said it was "just about right" compared with just 51% for TV.

Body Browser

Biology or Health homework is never going to be the same again now that Google has released Body Browser, a simulation of the human body. Users can travel, as in the 1980s movie “Innerspace,” through various layers of human anatomy, zooming in on internal organs, navigating around bones and peeling back layers of the human body until all that’s left are the nerves. The Body Browser works only in browsers that support WebGL, a new 3-D graphics tool that is appearing in the latest versions of popular browsers like Chrome 9 Beta from Google and Firefox 4 Beta. With WebGL, users do not need plug-ins like Flash or Java — the browser itself can handle complex graphics tasks.

The Body Browser is still a work in progress. Presently, only a female figure is available, and some of the controls are a bit balky. But the ability to zoom straight into a body and fly through it is remarkable — not to mention addictive.

Do Not Track?

The Federal Trade Commission is calling for a “Do Not Track” option to prevent advertisers from tracking your every move online. What that means is the possibility of a Web browser addition that would allow you to review the data collected about you or to choose to not be tracked by anyone. Of course in the real world, where the “law of unexpected consequences” rules supreme, that may not be as wonderful as that sounds.

Advertising networks systematically track the websites you visit as part of profiling your online behavior so they can target you to receive specific ads. Google and Microsoft, operators of the two largest ad networks, defend the practice, saying their respective companies provide extensive tools to ensure consumer privacy. Without those advertising dollars the Internet may also not be offering as much free information, often proffered because advertising dollars pay for the writing and accumulation, and newspapers, already struggling, may be some of the first victims.

Blasé About Browsers?

Many people are pretty blasé about their Internet browser, not really paying much attention to the tool they use to surf the Internet. Others are passionate, swearing by one over all the others. How do you feel about your browser? Take a look at this article entitled the Heat is on IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome as browser habits shift in USA Today  to see why the option to use a wide variety of browsers is not going away soon.

Are Kids Getting Cell Phones at a Younger Age?

The folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project say they have been getting a lot of questions lately about whether kids are getting cell phones at an earlier age these days. They say that you have to look at the data from the perspective of those who are 17 now to really analyze the numbers, and if you do that, the answer is “no.”  The bulk of teens are 12 or 13 when they get their first cell phone and it has been that way for this current generation now going through high school. Chalk one up for parents.

Just Grandma and Me

Another blast from the past. The wonderful Mercer Mayer storybook, Just Grandma and Me, that started the revolution for putting children’s books on computers has now made the leap to iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Echoes of my 2 year old son repeating “more and again” as each page of the story unfolded lives with me even today many years later. Welcome to the new era of eBooks to a digital classic.

Google Promises Faster Copyright Enforcement

Google, parent of YouTube, is promising to do a better job of policing and eliminating copyright violations, expecting to respond in 24 hours to complaints. That can be a tall order as the Google search engine indexes more than 1 trillion unique Web links and about 35 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube per minute. Viacom, the entertainment giant, is planning to appeal its suit against Google for copyright violations after a federal judge recently turned it down. While not revealing exactly how it is going to more quickly flag copyright violations, Google said the changes would be rolled out in the next month. Good news for parents is that violating copyright by uploading purloined materials to YouTube by anyone, including kids, is punishable only by having what you shared booted off the site with no legal ramification.