Friday, April 27, 2012
Schools Controlling Social Media Education
7:32 PM | 
Posted by
anonymous |
In the school district of Watertown, Massachusetts teachers and the district super independent are looking for ways to engage student in the 21st century. Some of the options they are weighing in on are things like how to educate students on the dangers of cyber-bullying, chat rooms, meeting strangers online, and other topics. The school district is also considering strange options of requiring students to have a facebook account. District superintendent Jean Fitzgerald said the schools would soon be moving to a district exclusive social network running a software platform named itslearning.
With that said this new way of school governments further managing students social networking abilities is kind of creepy to some. Many see the "educational" proposals as nothing more than simple plain indoctrination by the nanny state to keep students "safe". Others have called the school district blocking sites like facebook a pure example of how the state wants to control the natural evolution of the internet. Many parents think this will just give the school district the excuse then to just block the current popular social networking sites like facebook presently and myspace, tumblr, twitter for other users.
With that said this new way of school governments further managing students social networking abilities is kind of creepy to some. Many see the "educational" proposals as nothing more than simple plain indoctrination by the nanny state to keep students "safe". Others have called the school district blocking sites like facebook a pure example of how the state wants to control the natural evolution of the internet. Many parents think this will just give the school district the excuse then to just block the current popular social networking sites like facebook presently and myspace, tumblr, twitter for other users.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
High School Vpn Upgrades
Lets face it your local schools needs for faster internet connections and more bandwidth never seem to slow down. Take Albany Junior High School from New Zealand for example. The school had recently gone straight to Google Aps and upgraded there 100 megabit internet connection to keep up. But what they didn't realize was that there new 100 megabit internet connection was only working at 17 megabits per second due to the schools vpn network appliance.
As applications for the web and internet grow upgrade will need to follow. And they are definately going to be more costly so lets get ready to plan ahead!
As applications for the web and internet grow upgrade will need to follow. And they are definately going to be more costly so lets get ready to plan ahead!
Monday, January 23, 2012
High Tech HS Bomb Threat
A student in Wadsworth, Ohio was arrested after complicated technical details had been broken down to lead to the arrest. The student Guy T. Barnard made bomb threats through the use of internet proxy servers. Though at first a proxy server service may have given the student the feeling of anonymity with extra work law enforcement was able to track this student down. Barnard sent the school bomb threats to the school in an email from a proxy server.
Although most internet proxy servers can provide a good level of anonymity using them to send things like bomb threats are a no no. The government still has a good say in what goes online and ability to easily get logs. As well some proxy servers will send the origination ip address in the headers. When law enforcement was able to find a ip address in issued in the local area its most likely a dead giveaway.
Although most internet proxy servers can provide a good level of anonymity using them to send things like bomb threats are a no no. The government still has a good say in what goes online and ability to easily get logs. As well some proxy servers will send the origination ip address in the headers. When law enforcement was able to find a ip address in issued in the local area its most likely a dead giveaway.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Schools Games Now Online
A high school in Loup City Nebraska was one of the first schools two years ago to begin
streaming games online so fans could watch high school sports. They started originally
streaming because a father of one of the players on the school basketball team was serving a
tour of duty in Iraq. The video streamed online from Nebraska all the way to Iraq gave the father
the ability to still see his sons games daily while away from home. Other schools in the
Nebraska school district are now embracing the technology by posting links to the stream on the
schools website. Word of the game is also spread on social media outlets like twitter and
facebook as schools actually are embracing social media instead of blocking it. Though the
setup online high school sports isn’t as fancy as many would like it to be they are working on
picture in picture features and scorebord on same screen. Some of the basic hurdles in place
like bandwidth availability are also being overcome through services like justin.tv, ustream, and
bitgravity to keep the game live for everyone. The Nebraska school district is also hoping to place
advertisements in between game breaks and timeouts to fund a program to teach students the
new technology.
streaming games online so fans could watch high school sports. They started originally
streaming because a father of one of the players on the school basketball team was serving a
tour of duty in Iraq. The video streamed online from Nebraska all the way to Iraq gave the father
the ability to still see his sons games daily while away from home. Other schools in the
Nebraska school district are now embracing the technology by posting links to the stream on the
schools website. Word of the game is also spread on social media outlets like twitter and
facebook as schools actually are embracing social media instead of blocking it. Though the
setup online high school sports isn’t as fancy as many would like it to be they are working on
picture in picture features and scorebord on same screen. Some of the basic hurdles in place
like bandwidth availability are also being overcome through services like justin.tv, ustream, and
bitgravity to keep the game live for everyone. The Nebraska school district is also hoping to place
advertisements in between game breaks and timeouts to fund a program to teach students the
new technology.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Updating School Internet Policies
As times change and the internet evolves school districts are having to update internet usage policies. Discussions about social media sites like facebook's usage and activity are among the things being considered in changes of acceptable usage policies for students and teachers. The internet is not what it used to be 10 years ago with the additions of sites like youtube loaded with educational content that can be used in the classroom.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
New Zealand's High Speed Classrooms
School classrooms in New Zealand are getting a big push for high speed internet in the classrooms along with arming each student with a laptop. The Ministry of Education in New Zealand has there mind set on an almost 100 percent target rate of getting high speed internet in school classrooms to each student. They hope to offer enough speed and bandwidth to each student to provide a network capable of applications like video conferencing and cloud access. This push is not your typical high speed internet at school either. The plan goal is to get everything educational a student does on a laptop and to drop the paper and pencil and replacing it with what they call a “digital classroom”. Only time will tell if they succeed or not as new technology often creates easy distractions in the classrooms but also can provide a greater edge of benefits. A teacher will still be required to teach these students in person as some schools have tried to go all online and not to mention large class sizes.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
NJ School Hacked
An electronic break in was detected in a New Jersey school last week. The break in was discovered after an account password was found to be compromised. The school district of Ridgewood will not say if any and what if any data as been compromised, downloaded, or modified. The technical staff at the school plan to keep digging deeper to see if they can find out more specif details as the case is still quite early. Six students have been named as possible suspects but without complete proof no one can be certain who did what. And if anyone is guilty if at all. Since details are still in early stages it is best not to speculate. It is always good when choosing to create passwords for yourself to have upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols woven into your password making it hard to guess. One of the easier ways to create a strong password is to use sentence only you can remember that is about 25+ characters.
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