About Textbooks: Another Viewpoint

Here are suggestions from a high school teacher in Maryland, a guest blogger in edutopia. Shelly Blake-Plock’s blog, teachpaperless.com, tells how he’s been shedding textbooks, although he realizes that textbooks “serve the teacher quite well.” He doesn’t, however, think most textbooks do the same for students. Blake-Plock’s methods include encouraging students to learn from primary sources, to keep daily blogs of questions and thoughts about their learning, and to engage in projects based on their individual learning. His students use resources such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Helibrunn Timeline of Art History and BBC History. He suggests that English departments use novels that are available through Project Gutenberg, Open Library and Google Books and that mathematics teachers use their own questions, not questions from textbooks. They can put their questions on a class blog and have students create questions as well. Blake-Plock believes that teachers and parents can take the lead in changing the way our students are taught.

Bullying and Cyberbullying: Who Is to Blame?

With the wealth of information that’s been in the media about bullying and cyberbullying, it’s on just about everyone’s minds. We know that growing up isn’t exactly easy. We adults face problems with bullying, but we’ve learned how to handle it or perhaps we ignore it.  I’ve watch students let uncomplimentary remarks slide off like water on a duck, and I’ve seen children who are highly sensitive to any slight.  We know that the middle years are usually the toughest when it comes to kid nastiness, but we also find it from the elementary grades on. It’s everywhere where there are young people who trying to find their place among their peers. Sometimes it goes beyond normal day-to-day kid behavior and can cause lasting problems for those bullied or ignored. Teachers, parents, coaches, and others who work with children watch for bullying, but as we know, it often happens when adults aren’t around or anonymously online. Who is to blame for the bullying mentality and how might we stop it? A generation ago we confiscated the so-called Slam Books that featured inappropriate information about students in our classes.  Today we continue to watch during lunch sessions for “cool tables” for the in-crowd, try to keep up with school-related social interaction online, work with students on thoughtfulness and respect, and do our best to keep parents informed on the topic. Recently I asked a group of eighth graders who is to blame for bullying, cyber or otherwise. They agreed that the kids who do it were the problem. I asked if schools and teachers were to blame. The answer went something like this, “No, not everyone is nice. That’s the problem and kids should remember that. If a teacher sees bullying and doesn’t do anything, then the teacher is wrong, but usually teachers don’t see it. Who would do something not nice when teachers and parents are around?” When I asked what is the answer to the problem of bullying, one said, “Stay with nice kids. Don’t try to get into a group that does things that aren’t nice.”  Nice seems to be the answer, but how do we get everyone to take on that quality?

Join the Google Social Search Experiment

If you have a Google account, you can sign up to be part of the Social Search experiment,  an under review Google feature that that helps you find relevant public web content from people in your social circle, when you're signed into your Google Account. That means you will be able to find websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends' Google profiles. If you have friends who are prolific producers of web content, this can be a way to keep up with their latest postings without having to search through irrelevant details.

The World Is Watching

Perhaps one of the most dramatic case studies of how information travels and the changes in journalism is the dramatic protests in Iran over the election. "The whole world is watching" was one of the loudest rallying cries of Vietnam protesters gathered in the streets of Chicago outside the Democratic convention in 1968 and it seems that sentiment is even more true today. With Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube all making their almost instantaneous contribution of the sights and sounds of what is going on half a world away, it makes the struggle of the Iranian people up close and personal. The downside, of course, is that with so much noise, it's hard to separate real, verifiable information from hearsay -- or even deliberate lies. Bloggers have some advice on that including things like setting your Twitter feed to local Tehran time to confuse militia hunting down dissidents. Now that’s problem solving with technology.

Repairing Your Internet Reputation

Recently I pointed out an article on all the ways your online impression could get damaged. In a follow up article in the series, called Your Reputation Online, Part 2: Repairing the Damage , you probably won't be surprised to find (at least I wasn't) that companies are springing up offering help in reputation repair. One such company works on getting positive content on the first few search pages that show up on a client. That's because statistics show that fewer than 5 percent of searchers get beyond the third page of search results. So if you have a DUI on your record or have been fired from a high profile job, this company works on pushing that information down in search engine results. Perhaps a good thing to remember if you need to help your child push down what they would like to keep off the radar of future employers or college admissions people.

On the Internet Your Reputation Really Does Proceed You

Your DFI (Digital First Impression) really does proceed you these days. Whether you are a person, place, brand, business or thing, people usually can look you up long before they meet or are considering you. Worried about your DFI or that of your kids as they prepare for the future? Take a look at some of the ways the damage can be done in this article called Your Reputation Online, Part 1. These days everything from where you went to school, what your political leanings are, who your friends are (and their candid remarks about you) and even nasty comments from former employers are all online along with every past legal entanglement, divorce, DUI, traffic ticket, or bits and pieces of the past that might have found their way into the police blotter in your local newspaper. Of course, we are all our own worst enemies, usually revealing more online in blogs and on social networking than even our enemies. Have you Goggled yourself lately to see what your DFI looks like?

A Survey Reveals Social Networkers Concerned About Digital Manners

A survey released last week by the Consumer Internet Barometer, a production of TNS and The Conference Board, found that common pet peeves among social networking regulars include lack of privacy and, more interestingly, lack of "manners." While the survey doesn't delve into much detail about what people mean by the lack of manners, it is not hard to conceive of what they might be thinking about. How do you turn down a friend request without hurting the requester's feelings? What happens if you categorize someone as a "teammate" when they consider you more of a close friend? How do you avoid offending someone who doesn't make the cut as one of your "top friends?" How do you politely ask your friend to stop bombarding you with countless invites for yet another application? When should you just pick up and give someone a call versus just blowing them off with a digital message? Would love to hear your thoughts on this in regard to you and your kids.

Flashy Facebook Page May Lower Privacy Walls

Facebook fanatics who have covered their profiles on the popular social networking site with silly games and quirky trivia quizzes may be unknowingly giving a host of strangers an intimate peek at their lives and those of visitors to their sites who take them up on the challenge to play. Every widget or application that is added to a site means handing over information to the developer of that software and suddenly large groups of people you don't even know can have access to your data and that of your friends. That's because MySpace and Facebook, the largest online social networks, let outside developers see a member's information when they add a program. More than 95 percent of Facebook users have installed at least one application, it seems. So think about keeping it simple - for not only your sake, but that of your friends. (This entry is linked to the Washington Post and can be accessed for free but you need to register.)

Where Are We in Internet Safety?

It seems as if we've been writing about online safety on the Web forever, and even before the Web became so popular we were writing about safety on online services. Are we getting anywhere with keeping our children safe online? Certainly there are more programs to keep kids safe today, but there are also more problems-probably because so many more people are online and kids have learned to get around the safety nets we put out for them. Like drugs, smoking, and alcohol abuse education, we've tried scare tactics, monitoring, and reasoning. With technology, we've also tried filtering. Through it all, we've learned that we (teachers and parents) are the best Internet filters, monitors, and guides for our children-better than any program. One of the problems we face is that kids think they know so much more than we do about the Internet and think we are overreacting when it comes to their safety online. So what do we do? Because we can't watch our students all the time, we have to educate them and hope that they'll make the right decisions when we are not there to watch. What else can we do? Ideas?

From Facebook to Blog in One Easy Click

A new software application allows users to export information from their Facebook  social networking account directly to their personal blog. Six Apart, steward of the TypePad blog publishing system, released Blog It, a software application that enables users to cross-post information on Facebook to blogs using software from most of the major blog hosting companies, such as WordPress, Blogger, Twitter, Vox and Movable Type. The Blog It application -- which must first be added to a user's Facebook site -- also allows users to instantly notify people in their social network about the post using Twitter and Pownce, text messaging services that send updates to buddy lists.

Of course this raises some digital permanence issues.  As content travels from social networking site to blog it may lose whatever privacy controls protect it from outsiders. Both adults and kids seem to forget that once info is online you lose all control over where goes and what it comes to look like.