learningIT

BBC team exposes cyber crime risk

Piracy Has Become Mainstream, Studies Show

and for those students awaiting acceptance letters from universities and colleges:

10 Things They Don’t Teach You In Design School

The BBC Reports:

Surfing the internet, playing games and hanging out on social networks are important for teen development, a large study of online use has revealed.

The report counters the stereotypical view held by many parents and teachers that such activity is a waste of time.

More than 800 teenagers and parents took part in the three-year US project.

“They are learning the technological skills and literacy needed for the contemporary world,” said the report’s author, Dr Mimi Ito.

“They are learning how to communicate online, craft a public identity, create a home page, post links.

“All these things were regarded as sophisticated 10 years ago but young people today take them for granted,” Dr Ito told the BBC.

Click here for the full story.

Sorry for the delay. It’s been an annoying week. I have repeatedly been asked to change my password details to login here and a few times I couldn’t get in due to site maintenance. Another annoying item has been the appearance of Google Ads. Apparently they (EduBlogs) are experimenting. If these little ads appear, simply click refresh and they should magically disappear into the ‘internet cloud’ (hopefully forever).

I have also been busy creating a presentation on CyberSafety for the upper elementary classes at my school (grades 4-5). The video provided has been made as a reference for students and their parents to link within our website. The version done in class will be more interactive with greater discussion. Topics covered are posting profiles on social networking sites, netiquette, cyber-bullying, computer security (spam, viruses, worms, phishing, spyware, trojan horse, P2P) and guidelines for staying safe on the internet. View here.

In other news:

1. Facebook will impose it’s new facelift (story here).

2. New iPod range. Shake and shuffle! Great, now my Nano will look old. They have gone back to elongated style. (BBC video here)

3. Noel Gallagher uses GarageBand!

As the exclusive interview with Music Radar reveals, Noel Gallagher is a big fan of Apple’s GarageBand, which he prefers to his high-tech recording studio at home!

“I had my own fully functioning recording studio with an EMI II desk and a really cool Neve desk. But I kind of got sick of it because the demos were starting to sound better than the records,” Noel told MusicRadar’s US Editor Joe Bosso. “We actually do our demos now in Gem’s bedroom on his little GarageBand computer”, says Noel.

4. MacTubes 1.2 is an excellent free YouTube video player and downloader, with an interface similar to iTunes that is easy to use. (I haven’t tried this yet but will after this post. Will it will be better than Tooble?).

Download here. It’s free, but only for Mac.

FEATURES

• Create Customized Playlists
• Country Selection Option
• Search By Keyword Or Related Videos
• Search By Author
• Enter Video URL Or ID
• Download Video Files
• Much More

5. A few posts ago I mentioned how I was converted in posting items to YouTube and especially TeacherTube. Well in 23 days my simple addition has become a featured video and has been viewed 2991 times (as of now). Though it’s not in the tens of thousands, a teacher from the UK and the US have contacted me asking to use it. We have also exchanged other ideas with each other as well. Why aren’t we doing more of this in our classrooms?