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...

Join Well Approving people in spaces takes a bit of time. It is so important to know that when you ask to join a wiki or Diigo group or grouped on Linked in that you let the person approving you KNOW why you want to join . When You Don't If you don't, you force the person approving to go through and look at your profile to determine if you are a spammer. Sure, a spammer can lie, but usually they just don't put why! How to Get "Accepted" If someone puts a message: "Vicki, I heard about this group in a Diigo presentation you did at ISTE last year." Image via Wikipedia BANG they are approved immediately. But if they put nothing, I wait until I have time which is usually once a month for the Diigo educators group . If you are upset that you're not getting approved to join things more quickly, maybe it is because you aren't identifying yourself and why you want to join. People who identify why they want to join a space are showing good ci...

I have two very amazing young men looking over my shoulder as I write this post. They have a challenge and some questions to ask you and your students. We are looking for people and students who are willing to UNWIRE for a day. That's right. One whole day! Now, if you need to use technology for work/school that is ok. But, besides that we want your cell phone off, your xbox off, and even your TV off for a day. Are you and your students willing to take the challenge? Why or why not? Either way we want you to fill out our survey! They would like as many people as possible to take the challenge and fill out their survey between now and next Monday at 8:15 am Eastern. If you're NOT willing - go ahead and fill out the survey. If you are willing, come back and fill out this survey AFTER you have completed the challenge! (even if you fail) What do you think your students will say? This is part of our Digiteen Action project . <p>Loading...</p>

Image via Wikipedia The Dealia's swimsuit catalog came in the mail for my teenage daughter and I handed it to my youngest son and asked him to take it to her. He padded in the den and I heard him say, "Here's your bathing suit catalog, sis. Pick something that won't scar me for life!" Scarred for life? lol. Hmmmm. Not a joke if I think about it. Scarred for Life. As I listened to my book on iPod and cleaned the kitchen, I started thinking that that is what is happening to many of today's teens. We have driver's education because we want to protect kids from themselves. A car is a powerful machine and can kill. We have sex education because we want to protect children as well. Sex is a very intimate thing that shouldn't be taken lightly. Sex can also kill if one contracts various STD's . Cell phones and the Internet are powerful vehicles. Yet parents give kids cell phones like they are the latest gadget, ignoring what can happen if a chi...

" Even if you delete incriminating photos on your Facebook profile, the company is keeping them accessible to anyone online for up to 30 months. The social networking site admitted it had been keeping deleted photos for a "limited" amount of time."  the age.com.au "Facebook keeps 'deleted' user photos for years by Ben Grubb. Are you talking to students about the un-deletability of files? We talk about how important it is to allow kids to fail. The problem with social media is a zero tolerance for failure. You mess up and your online presence or even employability may be gone forever. Just ask the Burger King sink bathtub guy or Steven Slater from Jet Blue Airline employee who flamed at passengers and had several videos go viral. We use pencils when we want to let the kids erase and start over, but the Internet is most definitely in huge Sharpie permanent ink. This brings up the point of taking kids into safe places with us where they can lear...

I was on-line planning the Citizenship, Gridizenship: Online Community Building for Self-Sustaining Safety at ISTE this year (Monday morning at 8:30 am!) with some amazing co-presenters ( Anne Collier, Marianne Malmstrom and Bron Stuckey.) Marianne gave me the link to this presentation from Anne Collier and I've started watching and think this is something you should listen to in your on-line PD this week. Today I asked a person just finishing her masters the most important thing she learned from her program and she said, "I learned that I can learn everything I need to know on-line."  Quite sage advice. But you've got to commit the time and go out and get it.  You don't get smarter by rubbing Einstein's head and a computer doesn't make you smarter either.  It is what you and where you tune those antennae.  I first "met" Anne (author of Net Family News ) when I saw her on the PBS Growing Up On-line video series we use for Digiteen .  ...

Image via Wikipedia This from Odd News: Harvard University's moves to seek U.S. trademarks for everyday phrases such as "Ask what you can do" are defensive measures, a school official says. What else are they trademarking?  "Lessons Learned" and "Managing Yourself" said the Boston Globe in their August first, 2009 Article.  It also has a pending application for "The world’s thinking." The Boston Globe reports: "Securing each trademark costs from $500 to $1,000 in the United States and thousands more overseas, Calixto said. Legal disputes run up the costs. Harvard pays for the effort with the more than $1 million in royalties it earns each year from licensing its trademarks to such entities as bookstores and mall kiosks selling Harvard apparel; about a third of royalties go toward scholarships, he said." To me, it is interesting, but also disconcerting.  I have a cousin who was in a music program at a public universit...

OK, this is an issue that many students ask, "Why do i need to capitalize?" (I intentionally did that lowercase.) Well, there is one main reason: Not everyone speaks English. Using a lowercase "i" and other things like "cu l8r" and "r u OK?" are part of a slang called "im-speak" or instant messaging speak because it developed to speed instant messaging. If you choose to use this in your personal communications, that is your choice. But here, we are professional students and one day, you will be a professional of some kind. In that case, if you do not capitalize you will be judged as someone who doesn't care about your language. But most importantly, IM speak is very rude to those who have English as a second language and so that just makes it poor Digital Citizenship. As a Digital Citizen, you want to be inclusive and helpful to others AND a good communicator. (Some who don't speak good English will also use thin...

I'm looking at the policies for Open Access coming down from Universities. ( Add your institution to this growing list which also includes links to those repositories.)  This one from the University of Southern California : "University of California faculty shall routinely grant to The Regents of the University of California a license to place in a non-commercial open-access online repository the faculty member's scholarly work published in a scholarly journal or conference proceedings. In the event a faculty member is required to assign all or a part of his or her copyright rights in such scholarly work to a publisher as part of a publication agreement, the faculty member shall retain in the publication agreement the right to grant the foregoing license to the Regents. Faculty may opt out of this policy for any specific work or invoke a specified delay before such work appears in an open-access repository [in accordance with [an] opt-out mechanism set forth [in the...

I echo Grumpy Old Teacher's sentiments exactly when he says: Again I say, let's get our students (and colleagues) to stop using Google Images, and get some real quality images into their work! Amen to that, grumpy! Suggestions, including one new one: Every Stock Photo -- Free search Engine for stock photos including the ability to critique and share your photos.  What a great idea. (from Grumpy) Flickr Storm - (Also from Grumpy) Creative Commons Search - I've been using the built in creative commons searches in Firefox to find ours. (This is what we use.) What are your places for good, high quality, free photos? 

Brainstorming with Mindmeister .  This is a cool mind mapping tool!  The task at hand -- digital citizenship tips for parents.  So, what is left out?  (And if you give suggestions, please let me know if you allow permission to include in an article I'm writing.)  Will also be perusing thoughts at Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety & Success . This is a rough map, but as I work on it and update -- you'll see it change here.  As you are parenting your digitally savvy teen or child, what works for you?

Here are some upcoming events (some free and some not) I'd like to share with you. All of them have live elements that you may want to join! Sounding Board Informational Meeting Kim Cofino Wed April 30th at 11:00 am UTC ( see local times here) . You can access the session via the link on the Sounding Board page . There is still time to sign up your classroom to be a peer review classroom for the horizon project . Innovative Uses of Technology in the Classroom Friday, May 2nd 10:30 am - Noon EDT Free Ustream of Panel Discussion This Friday, May 2nd, I'm very excited to be at Princeton this Friday at " Students and Electronic Media: Teaching in the Technological Age " on a panel with Kevin Jarrett (about Second Life) and Daniel McVeigh ( Ocean of Know ). I'll be ustreaming our panel and we'll have a backchannel chat (check my blog Friday morning for instructions) If you're near Princeton, this is free and registration is still open. (I think.) See ...

We are working to add the 10 BEST videos on educational change to the wiki . What are they? Where should they go (looking for the best on each topic.) When we give people these videos, we're giving them something that helps them "sell" what they are doing . I suggest showing these videos for professional development, school boards, and anyone who cares about education. We've started a page for your nominations for the best videos. If we get too many, we may have some sort of voting thing (which would be great to have that much interest!) tag: ad4dcss , education , change , reform , innovation , learning

a cross post at the Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety, and Success blog Since this project is now 72 hours old, I thought we'd give a few stats for what is happening! We have 27 people signed up on the Advocates public list . 16 Readers for our Blog (Feed set up 24 hours a go.) Over 1200 views of the wiki, with 70 edits, and visits from 9 countries and more than 300 unique visitors and 64 members . 74 bookmarks sent to the diigo group with 40 members . 52 members of the Google Group with 24 discussions being tossed around Slowly percolating in the blogosphere with 7 posts so far . We can do better than this, maybe some people are waiting a bit. Lots of tweets beginning to share although I must admit a few of us are hogging the tweets. A logo design and another on the way for us to share and discuss. A set of tags for sharing and facilitating exchange of data and links An aggregation page for all of this (it is my personal launch page to start this.) Two projects that...

simulpost with Advocates 4 Digital Citizenship, Safety, and Success blog Just a quick update on this. I'll still keep my focus over here, but we're starting a group blog that I think will end up being much bigger than I. We're looking for a few passionate bloggers to join the group over there with me. Drop me a line! We've created one page to monitor all of the activities for this project - http://www.netvibes.com/coolcatteacher#Ad4dcss Where we're sharing We've also got a wiki started at http://ad4dcss.wikispaces.com The wiki uses the links we create in diigo and feeds the resources to the 9 major categories of digital citizenship that we're addressing. (See wiki for those.) We have a diigo group for bookmarking. at http://groups.diigo.com/groups/Ad4dcss This blog is where we'll list major announcements AND resource links, so it will be a good place to follow the activities. Where YOU can volunteer We have a donated Moodle space and Kate Olson is org...

I just set up a gcast podcast channel . I don't have time to record and edit podcasts, but gcast lets me make phone calls to you and that is what I did last night. I wanted to give you insight into why we need Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety, and Success and a little background on some of the people involved in the initial conversations as well as my ideas for what may need to happen. I hope you'll listen.

Since I have not yet responded to the Passion Quilt Meme , I've been prompted yet again. This seems a time to unleash my biggest passion for teaching today's students. Forgive me, I may get emotional. My heart breaks for these parents who are struggling with the kidnapping and beating of their child for the sake of Youtube popularity. This news show outlines what happens and talked to a psychologist. My Prediction We have a small window of opportunity to suggest and create structures of what WE , the educators who use these technologies, suggest we should do about the whole digital citizenship, safety, and success issue. Then, we will be TOLD what to do because of our lack of action. And we know how that goes. This came up Sunday Morning, when many of us came together in a little impromptu meeting with Sue Waters and Al Upton in elluminate (I'll post the link to the recording when it is released.) These are the brainstorming whiteboard pages (unedited). NOte that the...