Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

Privacy is a freedom we give ourselves. It is spring break. Facebook is full of my friends saying where they are (with their whole families), and it looks like most of them are posting publicly. Someone could easily look at the Camilla, Georgia and publicly see who is out of town. Location Based Girl-Finding App Uses FourSquare and Facebook Girls Around Me , the app that used Foursquare and Facebook location data to reveal the whereabouts of girls located around a person, had people upset . It is now pulled from the iTunes store after losing Foursquare API access . The Russian-based developer told the Wall Street Journal that: " Girls Around Me does not provide any data that is unavailable to the user when he uses his or her social network account, nor does it reveal any data that users did not share with others." Is Sharing Your Location a Big Deal? The fact is that girls and adults ARE sharing this information. Websites like pleaserobme have tried to poi...

a simulpost with Tech Learning There are definitely people who are not using Google Adsense correctly and I believe it is impacting children. Imagine my suprise about 2 weeks a go when I went to Peggy Sheehy 's Suffern Middle School blog at 1 am to find ads all over the page for Hot Tech Chicks and NO content until scrolling WAY down - ads were everywhere. After sending it to Peggy and Kevin Jarrett , they had been hacked but it looks like the ads may have been just late at night - not really sure.   Since then, edublogs has done quite a few upgrades, but I'm not sure they notified people that a breach had occurred. Hint:   If they tell you to update your password, they mean it! Then, I go into my email today and a Audrey Hill , who is corresponding with Julie and I about her vision for a middle school flat classroom project write that "I'm flying by the seat of my pants"  so, what ad did I get, "Erect Hard!" Seems that "seat of the ...

I'm testing out Coveritlive as used by my famous friend Ryan Bretag to cover the Parent Internet Safety Meeting at Princeton University starting right now! Here we go!

Public School Violence and Rumors of Violence in South Georgia A parent just called asking us to watch for strange people. (He says that there was a drive by shooting this morning at Colquitt County elementary school in Moultrie Georgia and that several bomb threats have been called in and all students have been sent home. I cannot confirm this online. ) However, the message from the superintendent from yesterday says the following: On Thursday, April 19, 2007, a message threatening violence was reported to have been sent from the home computer of a freshman student at Colquitt County High School. It was investigated and the student was removed from school. The police were notified. During the evening hours rumors began spreading of acts of violence to occur at Colquitt County High School today to commemorate the anniversary of Columbine. The rumors continue to be investigated, but at this point there has been no indication that there is a basis. The Moultrie City Po...

The new news site... Wikipedia. Fascinating blog post from Megan Golding , Wikipedia gets the news right ... "Not until I clicked on the Wikipedia article’s citations did I wind up at a major news outlet. I think Wikipedia-as-news-source is an important trend (and was the shining star in citizen journalism , according to one blog) ...I gave my students an opportunity today to see and comment on the Wikipedia-as-news-provider trend. After reviewing the article, the students talked about being impressed by the details. We also discussed the idea of smart mobs , which was new to most of them." Last time I checked the Wikipedia article , it had 138 sources . Although the talk page bounces around like a ping pong ball, actually many of the items "broke" there. This page has been edited over 500 times . On another note for bloggers, many in the blogosphere are calling for one day of blog silence on April 30th. I plan to honor it, however, I find it a disturbing trend...