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...

Social media has added to my life because there are incredible people in my sphere of socializing.What you get out of your time engaged with social media is directly proportional to the number and kind of people you socialize with online. I've seen teachers get on Twitter and follow no one and say, "I don't get Twitter." That's because Twitter isn't solo. Find the people who are using Twitter, like Jerry Blumengarten ( @cybraryman1 ) and Angela Maiers ( @angelamaiers ), and you'll learn a lot from them. If you don't get Google+ (and I don't really... yet, but I will) then follow people like Peter Vogel  or Chris Porter who do. If you don't understand Facebook, I've really found that Mari Smith has helped me get it. And in the last month or two, I've been enjoying my twice daily visits to Facebook. (5:45 am and 7 pm ;-) These people help us understand how to have effective conversations. Cool Teacher Conversations on ...

Petrified. Do I really want my entire life online? A friend started posting college pics on Facebook. (this is one of them- can you pick me out? Polka dots!) If you are filled with dread at the thought: what happens to today's students when they mature and realize what they've done. Are we making it so no one can change? If I had to go off to college with the stereotypes of high school hanging over my head it would have been horrible. Who gets a fresh start any more? Is it even possible? Will people need to change their names to start over? Just looking at this photo of friends enjoying our time together and I am glad to see it. But I still wonder about these questions. Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I know that since the Facebook Friending 101 for Schools I did here that my friend Sue Waters has since come out with a handy guide for Facebook over on Edublogger about the Why and How of Using Facebook for Educators . And Facebook has created their own Facebook For Educators guide. In this guide, Facebook notably DOES NOT talk about "friending students" per se. But does suggest using Facebook groups and pages. Privacy Option Issues The PROBLEM I have is point number three in Sue's edublogger article: " Despite what you may hear , there are strong privacy options that you can set up so only those that you want can access your information" The primary problem as I maintained in Facebook Friending 101 is NOT you. Although there are educators who post innappropriate things on their walls all of the time, MOST of you IF you are using it with your students are not. These privacy options ARE NOT ENOUGH for the scenarios I've presented. The Loopholes ar...

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...

Facebook has added an incredible complexity to our lives and relationships for one simple reason: it is in writing. The courts have always put things "in writing" in higher esteem above word of mouth . Now that we are inundated with video, text, and photographs and a set of complex relationships - we end up with things "in writing" that are distributed far beyond our true "friends" into  places that get us in trouble. I don't have all the answers but am wrestling with this problem and want to lay out the facts so you and I can become co-travelers on this journey. I speak from experience, however, having two significant experiences under my belt with the school in this arena, know that there are things that I cannot say about situations that come in out what I share. It can happen because it DOES. This isn't theory. Defining "Friend" Anyone who has seen The Social Network finds Mark Zuckerberg 's use of the word "friend...