Ed Tech Review

Website: http://www.ikeepsafe.org
Grade: B+
Cost: Free

The Internet Keep Safe Coalition group teaches basic rules of Internet safety to children and parents, reaching them online and in school. On this site you will find great free videos, online books, worksheets and more all aimed at teaching kids to be safe online. Kids are being targeted at astonishing rates through many different methods. The best way to protect kids is to teach them how to be safe. This site offers a powerful resource to help us reach kids in a way that is interesting to kids.

Website: http://www.uschamber.com/icw/reportcard/default
Grade: B
Price: Free
This is a quick post to let you know about a website that gives us a rundown on how your state stacks up when it comes to education. Unfortunately it doesn’t let you drill down to specific schools, but it’s fun and interesting, and a little eye opening. It is also fun to look at the irony in the system. For example Montana ranks an A for academic achievement, but a D in there data quality. Take a look, have fun, get mad, and then go back to teaching well.

Software :Nvu (pronounced N-view)
Website: http://www.nvu.com
Grade: A-
Cost: Free
Platform: XP, OSX, Linux

NVU is an open source software based on Netscape Composer from a while ago. It has been significantly improved and is now a very powerful and capable WYSIWYG (What you see is What you Get) web editor. With many powerful features that make it easy to build and manage a website. NVU is relatively intuitive and easy to use, however due to the complexity of the task managing links, menus, and web management takes a little effort to learn.

The support system for NVU is better than most open source projects, and has a wide variety of support options to help you learn the product. The manual and online guides are very helpful and cover most basic topics needed to create a great website. For more advanced help there is a forum, but it may not be active enough to get help for everything, or to get immediate feedback. Over all it is a very good program.

I read about the story below and was a little bit surprised that lack of knowledge and caution could lead to such big problems. The legal fact is that whether we intend to or not it phonographic material is shown to students we are liable. If you read further the material was left on the screen for some time because the teacher involved did not turn the computer off. As teachers we are responsible to take basic steps to protect our students and protect our computers from inappropriate content. Here are a few things that we can do help protect our PC’s from unwanted intrusions.

• Use recent windows software. The machine she was using was running windows 98 which is no longer supported by Microsoft which means it is no longer getting security updates. You may not need Vista but you should have a version that still receives support which is currently Windows 2000 and above.
• Keep your Operating Systems security updates up to date.
• Use anti virus software and keep it up to date.
• Use spy ware software and run on a regular basis.
• Turn of pictures in your email program. Many times we receive junk email or spam that have pornographic pictures. Most programs will let you download the pictures in individual emails that you approve when you turn photos off.
• If problems arise turn it off and try to fix it when students are gone. If you get one pop up you will likely get more. It is best not to deal with it until students are gone.
• Never leave students unsupervised!!!

There are a lot of technical challenges that arise when a machine gets infected, and it is impossible to stop everything, but if you are making the best effort possible to protect children and documenting your efforts you will likely avoid the challenges this teacher faced

This article is from http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070214-8850.html

Teacher faces jail time for porn pop-ups

2/14/2007 3:31:53 PM, by

Who is responsible for keeping the computers at school clean and child-safe? A Connecticut court is siding with the school system in the case of substitute teacher Julie Amero, who has been convicted for four counts of “risking injury to a child.” Amero now faces up to 40 years of jail time for pornographic pop-ups that appeared on a computer she was using in a classroom—pop-ups that she and her lawyers argue were a result of spy and adware on the computer, out-of-date virus software, and an expired firewall license—the perfect storm for pornographic pop-ups, all on a Windows 98 machine running Internet Explorer 5.

More

The State of Utah provides a great deal of resources to it’s teachers and students over the internet. Most of these resources can be found of the UEN (Utah Education Network) website. UEN is funded and administered through the Utah State Office of Education.

Some of these resources include:

• Free or low cost in service and training for learning Dreamweaver, Flash, Blogging, Microsoft Office, and more.
• Utah teachers can develop their own web page with links, homeworks lists, and general information.
• Free .pdf Conversion
• a list of Multimedia resources for teachers
• Interactive Learning games
• EMedia a collection of educational videos ready to stream via the internet.
• The Pioneer Library. World Book Encyclopedia, SIRS, Culture Grams, Utah Newspaper archives, State Archives, Visual Thesaurus and much more.

Many of these resources in the Pioneer Library are available commercially and would cost hundreds a month to have access to them. You have automatic access to the pioneer library when you log in through any state Library or School. On the site they have a password so you can log on from home.

This Blog has a Worldwide audience, and I have hesitated to discuss a resource that is helpful to Utah only Teacher’s when only a small percentage of my audience comes from Utah. Utah; however provides great resources for it’s teachers through it’s UEN (Utah Education Network) website. As I thought about this I decided to call upon the help of other teachers from many states so that we can create list of resources by state. As I receive information I will post it on this blog and hopefully we will be able to create a valuable resource that would have a list of resources for any state Providence or country. If you have some Knowledge of your states internet resources please send me an email at mike@expeditionproductions.com

My next post will provide a List of what Utah provides on it’s network.