16% have been approached by a stranger

Sixteen percent of who? Our children that have access to the Internet. This can be quite disturbing especially for parents who are aware of cyber criminal activities.

Parents, educators, and concerned citizens should be proactive in learning how to protect children from the dangers that the web present.

We cannot continue ignore such issues.

If you have the opportunity, please read what the FBI has to share about children and cyber crime.

Monstrous Uniform Resource Locators

Can you believe that a teacher (not calling out any names) or teachers still have students enter monstrously long URLs as displayed above? Don’t you know that by the time the students enter all of the letters CORRECTLY and actually get to the assigned website, that have the class period is gone?

Redirectors or URL shorteners are here to save us (especially students) from the headache from receiving repeated 404 errors/page cannot be displayed errors due to one incorrect character. My personal favorite are tr.im & bit.ly… There are many, many more; in addition, these sites are NOT blocked (for now) by school’s web filters.

So…If you are still posting URLs from hades, shame on you!

#As(y) I was minding my own business on Twitter…

I ran into a twitter post by Wayne Sutton about this new site called tweetasy. The goal of tweetasy is write a whole story using only 140 characters including the #asy tag. I posted a few very short stories. On the website, you can also vote on the stories that you like, kinda like or don’t like. Check it out and give me some feedback on what you think!

Shameless self-promotion using…

Dum da da dum……

?nternet For Everyone

First, let me address one issue. I have noticed that some people do not know the difference between an internet an The Internet. For clarification…

1. An internet is an interconnection of individual networks where routers & gateways are used to mesh these networks together.

2. The Internet (yes, I am stressing capitalization) is the name of a specific worldwide network.

Since we are talking about this topic of the Internet… this weekend there will be townhall meeting in Durham discussing how the US can advance its accessibility to the Internet. I may go out and check it out; and if so, I will share!

The Digital Alien

Digital Natives as coined by Marc Prensky are students that we teach that inherently have integrated technology into their lives. On the other hand, digital immigrants are somewhat new to the technology scene and are usually described as archaic educators that struggle in the attempt to “get on the edtech bandwagon of the 21st century.” Apple has a great article on the comparison of the two groups.

In my humble opinion…

I feel that there exist another minuscule elitist group of students  (feared by school technology assistants) that go beyond the status of digital natives.

Why?

They are consumed by the love of technology and intrinsically pushed to go where they are not permitted either on or offline. Curiosity of computers or even electronic is not enough for these students; they are also not satisfied with the current established boundaries by parents or schools. So they defy or cross the designated boundaries established for them.

For many years and somewhat still today, these students when caught are labeled as hackers. Instead, please consider them as digital aliens. Pioneers such as Stephen Wozniak , Linus Torvalds, or even Kevin Mitnick are great examples of this breed of student. Let’s not be afraid of them, but instead direct their focus to a constructive direction. Also, here is an interestingly comical-to-me and very outdated (2001) satirical web treasure that shares how to detect if your child is a digital alien.

Writing Ideas: Super Heros!

Yes… I am a math teacher. However, students must be able to communicate when using numbers. Since reading and writing are important elements of communication, I should give students the opportunity to use these skills in my classroom; especially now high stake assessments in math are less computation and more application and performance-based.

So, I will always talk about writing and reading in addition to math activites on my blog. I ran into this really cool website that maybe more geared to middle schoolers.

With this website, I would use it to challenge my students to create a NEW super hero and write a story, word problem, or narrative chain involving their creation!

If you have any ideas on how to use this website in the classroom, please let me know!

Get WYSIWYG’ed Out of WP!

Unfortunately, after blogging using WP for a month or two on a consistent basis, I found some missing format features in WP’s kitchen sink. Apparently it doesn’t give me enough tools to work with.

The tools that are missing for example: change the font, font size, add tables, change content template, or super/sub-scripts. You can Google for a multitude of online HTML WYSIWYG editors. This one that I found I use is pretty good. All you have to do is copy and paste your code under the HTML tab in the WP post editor and voila!

So don’t Let WP Limit Your Creativity and try it out!