Teens may have a better understanding of privacy issues than the adults around them. Unfortunately, when you are a high school student, your personal judgment can still be challenged by an unsympathetic principal.
The Raleigh News & Observer reports that at Cedar Ridge High School in Hillsborough North Carolina, more than 300 juniors were given the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). The military provides and administers the tests without charge, and in return the scores and students' contact information are sent to military branch recruiters and the school.
Cedar Ridge Principal Gary Thornburg was willing to sign on to this deal to get access to what he views as a valuable career assessment tool. There is supposed to be an opt-out procedure, but three students who refused to take the test were sent to the in-school suspension room to take it--not as discipline, according to Thornburg, but because the in-school suspension teacher was available to supervise them while other students were taking the test. Sounds like a blatantly disingenuous answer to me. In my experience as a student and teacher, when you send students to in-school suspension, it is going to feel like a punishment and be perceived that way by others. Surely their well-equipped media center could have handled three students for independent study.
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In the movie Hairspray (2007), Tracy Turnblad gets sent to detention for "inappropriate hair height". But instead of being a punishment, her pink slip is a ticket to a higher education than her school is willing or able to teach, and an opportunity to enjoy the greatest freedom of all--the freedom to be herself and to follow her dreams. The currency rebels of today have moved from hair height to copyright, and the hottest ticket to detention is...Firefox. !!!w00t!!! Consider this facsimile of a letter supposedly sent from the Principal's office of Big Spring High School in Newville PA: (UPDATED)
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Teachers have an unlimited supply of interesting ideas for classroom projects, but have often been limited to the resources they could afford to contribute from their own pocketbooks.
Seven years ago, a history teacher in the Bronx started a Web site that directly connected teachers and donors to fund classroom projects. This week DonorsChoose announced that its program has expanded to include every public school in America.
This "open source" approach to supporting public schools encourages teachers to be innovative and entrepreneurial. Their proposals compete in the marketplace of ideas to attract support. Everyday citizens are invited to become philanthropists who can make a big difference by pooling their contributions, from $10 on up.
As a donor, I found that my experience on DonorsChoose channels reminded me of the thrill of an eBay purchase. But instead of making an impulse buy for something that I didn't really need, I was making a contribution to a worthy cause. In return, my family has received wonderful thank-you packets from teachers and students that include letters and photos of the projects we funded.
... Read moreWhen you look at technological generation gaps, the ubiquity of cell phones is one of the dividing lines between youth and "elders." Today's teens can't imagine life without cell phones, and if you walk across a college campus you'll see students glued to their phones seemingly at every waking moment.
On the adult authority figure side of this divide, some school districts, including Cleveland and New York City, are trying to ban cell phones outright. Now I can understand an "out-of-sight, out of trouble" approach, but the strictest bans prohibit the devices anywhere on campus, even in the bottom of a backpack or a locker. Kids are ingenious in their attempts to come up with creative ways around the ban, everything from hiding a phone in a sandwich roll to parking the devices for a fee at a nearby store.
... Read moreIt's back to school time, and Internet safety expert Linda Criddle has come up with homework for schools, students and parents: Do a safety checkup of your school's Web site to ensure that it is not making too much personal information publicly available.
She has created Guidelines for Safer School Web Sites to help schools cope with the new realities of our information society. News that can be appropriately shared within a school community--student names, team affiliations, sports practice times, and photos, for example--can expose students to considerable risk for misuse when shared with the whole world online.
Criddle says, "When you know that a student likely lives within the geographical boundaries of the school district, a full name or photo provides too much information. A simple phone book look-up will likely provide their address. These key pieces of information may also unlock other information about a child. For example, a simple search on the child's name gleaned from the school Web site can, for example, be used in Web services like MySpace, Friendster and Facebook to provide even more information that can be used for criminal purposes."
There is a realistic solution to this problem, which is to ask schools to look carefully at the information they are sharing, and to create a two-tier Web site that sequesters identifying information within a password-protected area.
Criddle wants school Web sites to serve as one example that fits into a larger social context. The 4-H club's local Web site, the opera's donor list, or a grief support group's online chat all face similar challenges. Criddle teaches that these issues apply to organizations of all kinds and people of all ages, and raising awareness within schools is one good place to start.
MySpace has quadrupled its estimated number of registered sex offenders posting profiles on the site, from its May estimate of 7,000 to a current tally of 29,000. The pages of identified offenders have been deleted. What does this news mean for parents? How do we assess risk and keep it in perspective, and what best practices should be implemented on family, corporate and societal levels to keep kids safe?
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