Westminster cop loses job in high school sexting case By Kirk Mitchell The Denver Post Posted: 04/07/2012 08:18:05 PM MDT|Updated: 2 years ago A Westminster police officer apparently was fired following a sexting investigation in which three Standley Lake High School students face possible felony charges. Police have presented evidence to District Attorney Scott Storey for possible felony charges of child pornography against two teenage students, according to police spokesman Trevor Materasso. A girl who attends the school also was involved in the incident and could face charges as well. "It's related to a sexual offense that would require someone to register as a sex offender," Materasso said. The Police Department opened a sexting investigation involving the three students on March 20. Six days later, the department opened a personnel investigation involving a detective assigned to the investigative unit, Materasso said. He said the officer, whose identity was not released, stopped working for the department on April 4.
Infographic: 5 Ways You Can Lose a Job on Facebook If you thought you could "be yourself" on Facebook, as opposed to the more free-for-all Twitter or LinkedIn, you may want to reconsider. If you thought you could "be yourself" on Facebook, as opposed to the public free-for-all of Twitter or the buttoned-down professional circles of LinkedIn, you may want to reconsider. This June, the Federal Trade Commission approved the creation of a "Social Intelligence Report" that lets private companies archive your social media activities for up to seven years, for "compliance" reasons. A human resources manager can hire consultants, like those at the Social Intelligence Corporation, to compile a report of what you've posted across all your social networks (kind of like how a landlord checks your credit score). All this is confirmed in the infographic below, created by MindFlash and based on a 2009 survey from CareerBuilder. Credit: MindFlash (click to enlarge)
Facebook Welcome to WiredSafety How to tune in to your wired teen (CNN) -- Meet the "digital natives." They are the teens and tweens who flock to MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites. Facebook attracted 30.6 million U.S. visitors during September. With ages barely into the double digits, these "digital natives" are growing up with the Internet. Actual public spaces -- the parks and playgrounds their parents enjoyed as children -- are being replaced by the virtual spaces of Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, social networking Web sites, instant messenger platforms and video-music swapping sites. Sure, the "digital native" is a stereotype, but it's one that might sound familiar to many parents and educators puzzled by the social habits of this young and wired generation. According to Anastasia Goodstein, author of "Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online" and blogger for Ypulse.com, theirs is a virtual space wherein they play games, experiment with self-expression, and socialize with friends. Don't Miss
Social-Networking Sites Draw Teens In In the largely unsupervised digital world, youths set the rules. They haven't abandoned our shopping malls, coffeehouses, fast food joints, or convenience store parking lots, but increasingly, high school students are hanging out online as well as off, using social networks to congregate and stay connected with friends. Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace provide parallel universes in which the typical teenager now spends about an hour a day. Indeed, social networks -- which support messaging, live chat, file sharing, and more -- have become so pervasive, says Kali Trzesniewski, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, that it would be hard to find teens who aren't using at least one of these sites. What's going on here? Plenty. In other words, they're doing what teenagers have always done, only in a virtual venue that's open 24/7. Being Part of the Crowd Ian Boyd was even more skeptical, but he ultimately joined the club, too.
How to Talk About Life Online Tips for teachers to help students be safe on the Internet. This how-to article accompanies the feature "Social-Networking Sites Draw Teens In." Diane Crockett, a teacher at the Brevig Mission School, in Brevig Mission, Alaska, population 278, decided to tackle social networking as a class topic after she saw some of the MySpace pages created by her 12-year-old daughter's friends. She noticed background graphics showing marijuana leaves, public comments that revealed highly personal information, and photographs of kids in sexy poses. To encourage more critical thinking about life online, Crockett developed a multipart digital project about identity, which helped her win a statewide technology award. The project integrated a variety of Web 2.0 tools and addressed academic standards, particularly writing. Crockett says teachers can use in-class discussions about social networking to get students talking about the following topics: Privacy: How much information should friends reveal online?
Connecting School and Home: 360-Degree Communication Too Big to Know The Internet knows no boundaries. That's why parents need to set limits for their kids. Easy to say, hard to do, and especially difficult if parents have to do this on their own. Schools need to create a 360-degree communication loop with parents about how to navigate the digital landscape. This year's group of fifth grade students (now entering the stream of 'tweendom and preparing to step into the potentially perilous middle school years of sixth-to-eighth grade) was born in 2001. School-to-Parent Communication Schools have taken on a more significant, all-consuming role in helping parents find the right language to communicate with children, especially in the digital realm. Here are starting points for schools to communicate to parents: Start early, when your child is in third or fourth grade. Testing the System What happens when your child commits a transgression online? Keep calm.Maintain an even tone of voice.Honor the mistake. see more see less
Turning Students into Good Digital Citizens 21st Century Literacy | In Print Turning Students into Good Digital Citizens Schools have always been charged with the task of producing good citizens. But how has our definition of a "good citizen" changed over the ages? By John K. In today's world of near-ubiquitous connectivity, in which ordinary people have almost instantaneous access to unlimited stores of information and the ability to interact with anyone, anywhere, anytime, what does it mean to be an effective citizen? Ask a K-12 educator these questions and chances are the answers will have something to do with teaching proper behavior and setting appropriate prohibitions. But some educators, particularly those who think about this issue in higher education, will say that digital citizenship has less to do with safety and civility than participation in the worldwide online conversation--participation that requires a set of relatively sophisticated skills.
A Parent's Guide to Twitter and Education As an educator, there are tons of great hashtags available to find the resources I'm looking for. Hashtags are usually found at the end of a 140 character tweet. I think of them like television channels, only there are many more to choose from and you can even create your own for your organization or team. Today, the most widely used educational hashtag on Twitter is called #edchat. On Tuesdays at 12pm (Eastern) and 7pm (Eastern), you can join hundreds of educators around the world discussing a topic chosen by a public poll during the days leading up to the chat. For more information on #edchat check out a recent piece by educational technology guru Steven Anderson (@web20classroom). For parents on Twitter, there are hashtags that offer support in raising children and supporting the work of schools. Like other educational chats, #PTchat has a weekly time where educators come together to discuss a certain topic - Wednesday nights at 9pm (Eastern). Last 5 #PTchats Archived
Social Media Guidelines Editor's Note: Check out the series of "How to Create Social Media Guidelines for Your School" articles that Steven Anderson wrote for Edutopia in May 2012, or download the full version as a PDF. Look what happens on the Internet in one minute. More and more, social media is becoming a part of our daily lives. Just today, Mashable is out with a report that says Pinterest (which is less than a year old) is the #3 social network in the U.S. This report mentions that the amount of monthly traffic Facebook receives is seven billion page views, and Twitter receives 182. But it isn't just adults who are moving more of their lives to online spaces. And it isn't just teens. This data is staggering. The Age of Personalization Being involved in social media allows adults, teens and kids connect with each other, learn with each other and grow together. We live in an age of personalization. Yet when many of our students reach the schoolhouse door, it's like the Internet and social media don't exist.