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The 6th and 7th grade headed to the pass for a great community experience, complete with snowball fights, sledding, skiing, snowboarding, games, skits and great food. Our digital cameras and new rechargable batteries got agreat workout this trip - students snapped over 300 photos. Here are a few of the best:
What do you do when your computer mouse breaks?
6th grade tackled the issue today in tech. After completing an email survey and talking about tech we encountered over break, we all disconnected our computer mice. We learned keyboard shortcuts and controls to successfully open programs, access menus and exit. Some specifics:
Review:
Program controls:
Advanced stuff:
Students accomplished some amazing feats even without a mouse, including:
written by Julia D.
Digital identity, you leave one almost every where, it is the identity you can make by just searching the web. Google save your information that you leave by searching about any thing for a total of 8 months, and it’s not that hard to look at them if you know how. Hackers could get your credit card number, phone number, name, age, and date of birth. Sometimes people tracked can be bad, but other times it’s what people need to find the source of a bad use of the internet. If you are tracked by a website and the website is hacked then the hackers can easily access all your info, but if you aren’t tracked and you do something bad with the information you lost an opportunity to stop them.
I think that the idea of erasing things is good and bad, because if someone uses that information for the wrong reason then if it had been there it could have been stopped? Then again if your memory is saved, and people take that information and send you tons of random things about the stuff you search that you don’t really need; that’s a bad feature about saving the information.
The second article is an explanation of most sides of the story about anonymously searching the web. She allows you to see everyone’s perspective of it, which is nice if you want a better understanding of the concept. This makes it easy to make an argument for either side, good or bad.
It would be a good idea for a person with a medical condition, because once they see that you searched a type of medicine then you will most likely get a ton of SPAM that you don’t necessarily want in your inbox.
The idea to an employer wouldn’t be good though because maybe one of their employee’s is using it to look up another rival companies phone/email to switch to that job. If that was one of your top employee’s than the anonymously searching the web proposal might be something that you wouldn’t want to do.
An employee might think of it as a good idea though because if you are working and you are looking up another job you most likely don’t want your employer to see that. So the idea of it erasing all that you searched might be good to an unhappy employee.
There are many different opinions to this concept, and they all have ups and downs. So for right now it is pretty even with deciding whether it is good or bad, but I believe that as long as you are using it for the right reasons and not putting it to bad use it should be OK.
Articles:
http://lifehacker.com/software/anonymity/search-the-web-anonymously-with-askeraser-332574.php
http://websearch.about.com/od/searchingtheweb/a/anonymous.htm
Tech in the News
Microsoft, owner of one of the top 3 search engines in the world, is interested in buying Yahoo! (it’s closest competitor) in an effort to bulk up for a head-to-head competition with Google.
Today News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch’s company that owns Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal, FoxNews and more) announced that it is in talks with Yahoo! to buy a stake in the company.
The 7th grade spent our class together discussing the implications of both of these potential events. For the Microsoft merge, we discussed why MS would be interested in buying Yahoo!, how search engines generate revenue from advertising, and the implications of having less choices for search engines.
When talking about the News Corp. deal, we went discussed freedom of the press, the building of communications conglomerates and the effect of monopolization on competition and freedom of choice.
Students ended class in small groups. Each group chose an industry (fashion, booksellers, ski resorts, to name a few) and imagined what things would look like if a single company took over that entire industry. Some discussion highlights:
written by Alexander
http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/12/facebooks-is-al.html
Your digital identity is the face that you have on the internet. This is the person you paint for your self on the internet. This is from your bank account to your MySpace account or online gamer tag. It’s who your are in the digital world. You should always manage your digital identity so you remember what you make accounts on and where you put out your information.
It says that Facebook can track you to other websites even after you log out and they can gather enough information to know about you. I think it’s wrong. It’s too easy for people to find you online. I think that it’s weird and wrong that they have this beacon thing that can track you continuously and it should stop. I mean, who needs all that information on you?
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13880_1-9834148-68.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1040_3-0-5
There are ways to protect your self online. This article suggests that there 5 ways to protect your identity online. It says that you should never trust any website, don’t use internet explorer, use a temporary credit card number, use an anoyminizer, and don’t use Google.
There related because Face book can track you down. The other article is talking about how not to lose your identity. Face book is warning you about how easy it is. So theses relate because there both warning you about how easy it is. The second article is telling you how to protect yourself. The first article is telling you its happening. They together prepare you for what you need to do.
On the other hand, when you play a video game online, use an online account for your Xbox, or anything else like that, it would be good to do this because you can play the video game and have fun. Here, it’s ok to do that, but you would still have to be carful and like the same for high scores and other things. Now, people could argue that video games are bad for you in general, without adding the risk that you could loss your identity by playing or logging in online.
Finally, I think that you should always be carful with your identity but still it’s not like with a video game or something like that. You should never put more information out about yourself than you have too. In conclusion, it’s becoming a lot more easy to track you and I think that we should try to minimize it.
written by Tristan
Fake caller ID could be fun and when used right is harmless. For example it would be fun and harmless to call Sam and use the caller ID of the CIA. But if I used the caller ID of the IRS and told him he had to pay 1millon dollars to my bank account or he was going to go to jail then it is harmful and bad. Digital ID is what who you are on the computer, any pictures, text you put on the internet make up your digital ID.
The digital identity of the caller ID is what shows up on your phone when you get a call. So when you change it you change you digital ID so if you make your caller ID to George W. Bush it’s like if you made your email address to the same as George W. Bush.
The article I read says that “spoofing” caller ID has become a common and only illegal in the U.S if it involves fraud for revenge is fine. It all so say that changing caller ID is only a “push of a button away” and other services of spoofing companies. Scariest of all it tells how a motivated stoker could make a credit card on their account, but congress tried to pass a bill to have trustable caller ID, that didn’t pass. Florida, Alaska, Delaware and New York have passed laws to limit spoofing caller ID. http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9788008-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1040_3-0-5
Spoof card (http://www.spoofcard.com/) is a company that offers spoofing. The costs are $10.00 for 60 minutes $20.00 for 120 minutes $40.00 for 240 minutes $80.00 for 480 minutes and free for 2 minutes. The 2 minutes does not include the voice change. You can select a male or female voice and when you talk the person on the other side heres it . You can record calls and listen to them again.
Fake caller ID can be fun when used right or mean when abused. Some states are trying to out law them but no major laws have been made. Many different companies make it easy to change your caller ID.
This weekend the 7th grade put on an amazing school dance in the Great Hall and invited middle schoolers from the area to attend. Bubble machines, snacks, a limbo contest, dance lessons - everyone had fun hanging out with friends and making new ones. Teachers served as chaperones and we had cameras on hand to document the event for the yearbook.
I was happily snapping photos when a 7th grade student came to talk to me: “My friend [student from a different school] said that you just took a picture of her, and you don’t know her.”
The friend then walked up to the two of us and said “Don’t take my picture!”
For a moment I was taken aback; this is a Billings event, I’m a Billings teacher and I’m taking photos on campus for the Billings yearbook. Then I realized that this student was doing exactly what I ask all of my students to do - she was conscious of her digital identity and was trying to maintain control of where and when digital photos of her exist.
So often, when someone is trying to take a photo and we aren’t in the mood to appear in front of the camera, we end up covering the lens with our hand or hiding our face. This sometimes turns into a game, the photographer attempting to catch a photo while the subject laughs and turns away.
A much more effective way of communicating is to do just what this visiting student did. She confronted the photographer and clearly demanded that the behavior stop. This is the best way to make sure that your images don’t get out of your control - Zia and Connor have both posted on some digital identity horror stories in the past.
This week students undertook a 4-day project creating their own “Choose your own adventure” stories.
This project was a great opportunity to revisit the concepts of “design” and “content” that we discussed when building web pages back in November. PowerPoint was a great tool for this lesson - we used hyperlinks that allow the viewer to choose what path a story should take.
On day 1, students were introduced to PowerPoint. We pointed out similarities and differences between the program and others in the Microsoft Office suite. We learned to save documents, add new slides, insert hyperlinks and add content.
On day 2, students learned to make global design changes (background, font selection, etc) and how to change individual slides while fine tuning their story content.
On day 3, we took a step back and created a visual representation of our PowerPoint slides using Inspiration, an inexpensive brainstorming/outlining program. This program teaches us to input our thoughts and ideas in either a word-based or graphic-based manner and swap back and forth between the two views.
Day 4 was used for finishing touches and catch up.
Overall a fun time was had and we learned some great tech skills in the process! Next week we’ll look at different methods of presenting our work using file export functions, and also how design and content fit into the Berlo’s SMCR model of communication.
written by Peter O.
Online identities are a way of sharing real or fake information about your self to a website like MySpace. An online identity is a perfect way of creating a whole new life because you choose what you want people to know and what you don’t want them to. Sharing a video of your self is a type of online identity because you are letting people know what you look like and might be telling them about your personal life. It’s also a way of them seeing what kind of person you might be depending on how you are acting in the video and what you are saying.
The internet allows people to ask for help but unfortunately it doesn’t work the best which can result in deaths or other tragic events occurring. In the following two stories you will hear about how the people in them used the internet to share information about them selves with other people.
Columbine shooting was committed by two high school students Klebold and Harris they were both in their senior year. Harris had a record of minor offense for position of small explosives and threatening messages to certain people. They both had posted blogs and videos of their actions leading up to the shooting. Although Harris had also posted a hit list of the people he intended to kill no one took it seriously and thought it was real. Both Klebold and Harris attended therapy and anger management classes on the courts demand.
After the shooting accrued several things were indentified to the deaths of the students. Both shooters had specific people they had targeted to kill. They shot a lot of the jocks and popular kids, probably because they had bullied Harris and Klebold earlier on in the school year. Harris also killed several kids who strongly believed in god and were very religious. These people who had a strong belief in god who were killed were all girls. There were several warning signs that could have prevented this from happening if both friends and family of the 2 boys had paid close attention to them. Including the fact that Harris and Klebold had several videos across the internet talking about what they were planning on doing and when. They had set the date of the shooting to accrue on Adolf Hitler’s birthday April 20th due to the fact the earlier date was delayed because they had problems making their bombs.
Lots of schools were worried about this happening again do to the fact they had a lot of Goth and Emo students who had a troubling pass. So several schools installed a no bullying policy and made kids who had troubles see a therapist or psychiatrist for help.
Another resent tragedy was the Finnish High School shooting which occurred on November 7 2007 when high school student Pekka Eric Auvinen at the age of 18 brought a hand gun to school and killed 9 people. Both this incident and the columbine shooting involve the use of video messages and blogs. In this case Eric had posted a video of himself on YouTube describing how much he admired the columbine shooting. He included several disturbing thoughts saying that he was planning on doing a copy cat of the columbine shooting at his own high school. A You Tube user saw this and warned the police of what was going on in hope they would check it out. The police did not check it out probably because they thought it was a joke and didn’t want to believe that it was real. Eric probably was trying to ask for some ones help in his video but it didn’t work.
Online identities can be a good thing if you pay attention to the message it is showing other people. While they are not the best way to get some ones help because they might not realizes that you really are going through a hard time and might take it as a joke. So this means that the police should take these messages shown in videos more seriously because so far they have resulted in lots of deaths and injuries. This has huge impact on the community around them and the families of the victims and gunmen too. I have changed my mind on how much information I am willing to share with websites and other people online now.
These are the sites where I got my information from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokela_school_shooting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_identity
written by Sam C.
Digital identity is what other people refer to you as in technology. Digital identities are something to be careful around, because people can steal your identity, take your identity and say things about you that aren’t true, and that can put you in danger or change your life. If you use Facebooks Beacon program, Facebook can track what you do on the internet, even after you log out. In my opinion no one should have a Facebook account, but if you do, you just have to be careful.
My first article, Facebook Is Always Watching You, by Betsy Schiffman, (http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/12/facebooks-is-al.html) which was published on December 4, 2007, says that Facebook can get really detailed information about what you do on the internet. They can also link that information to your individual Facebook profile, with usually has personal stuff on it. Also, once you do your stuff on the internet, your friends know what you did, before you know it. According to this, it’s pretty easy to block Facebook, you just have to know some stuff . For instance, you can not click on the remember me box when you are logging into Facebook, and you can also by a Firefox plug-in that blocks data going between partner sites. I think this article is informative, and gives good reason to be careful on the internet.
My second article, Facebook partners quiet on Beacon fallout, by Juan Carlos Perez and Nancy Gohring (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/11/AR2007121100723.html), was published on December 11, 2007. Here, it says that many of Beacons users were emailed and didn’t want to talk, apparently thinking that being tracked by Beacon and the uproar around it would pass, and didn’t really care about being tracked. A month ago, people were shooting complaints left and right, and demanding that they change it. Facebook has changed twice to make it more strait-forward to opt out. Still, Beacon tracks logged out users, former users, and even nonusers. Then Beacon sends all the info back to Facebook, without the people’s permission, and without them knowing. The CA has done research, and it has prompted the question of whether Beacon should have warnings on partner sites saying that Facebook will know they were there, even if they aren’t Facebook members. This article is really interesting because of what it says about the decline in complaints since last month.
I think Facebook is bad, but lots of people like it. They like it because they can talk to friends, send people pictures, and all sorts of stuff. It’s different from email, because it’s easier to send pictures. Also, you don’t have to email some one, you can just put whatever you want on your page, and all of your “friends” can see it.
In conclusion, here are some things you can do to stop it tracking you: Don’t click the box that says “remember me” on it when you’re logging in to Facebook, and you can also get a Firefox plug-in that blocks data going between the partner sites and Facebook. The two articles are really informing, and the change in the amount of complaints is really interesting. My opinion is that you shouldn’t use Facebook , and you should be careful on the internet. I am going to be careful of Facebooks partner sites.