Next Tuesday the National School Boards Association will release a report called: “Creating & Connecting: Research and Guidelines on Online Social and Educational Networking.” The report contains good news about student networking habits along with recommendations to school district leaders to get a better handle on how their students use the digital technologies that increasingly define their generation. Here is an example from the report:

Only .08 percent of all students say they’ve actually met someone in person from an online encounter without their parents’ permission. The vast majority of students, then,seem to be living by the online safety behaviors they learn at home and at school.

School district leaders seem to believe that negative experiences with social networking are more common than students and parents report. For example, more than half of districts (52 percent) say that students providing personal information online has been “a significant problem” in their schools,yet only 3 percent of students say they’ve ever given out their e-mail addresses, instant messaging screen names or other personal information to strangers. Similar differences occur between districts’ beliefs and students’ and parents’ reported experiences with inappropriate material, cyberbullying and other negative incidents.

More at TECH.BLORGE.com and BoingBoing.com

Next Tuesday the National School Boards Association will release a report called: “Creating & Connecting: Research and Guidelines on Online Social and Educational Networking.” The report contains good news about student networking habits along with recommendations to school district leaders to get a better handle on how their students use the digital technologies that [...]