A student in the Dallas suburb of Duncanville, Texas this week gained internet fame for lecturing his teacher about her lecturing abilities – or, rather, her lack therof. The student, named Jeff Bliss, was recorded by a classmate as he made his way out of the class room. During his exit he complained that the teacher only handed out “packets” instead of actually teaching.

“I’m telling you what you need to do,” said Bliss. “You want kids to come into your class, you want ‘em to get excited for this? You gotta come in here and you gotta make ‘em excited. You want a kid to change and start doing better? You gotta touch his freakin’ heart.”

Dallas TV news station WFAA has interviewed Bliss, who stated that he doesn’t regret his rant and stands by his statements.

WFAA was not able to reach the teacher seen in the video, though a Duncanville school district spokesperson told them that the district is “currently addressing the situation.” The spokesperson also implied that the teacher’s classroom conduct could be investigated as well, though the student’s issues “could have been handled in a more appropriate way.”

That may be the case for an Akron, Ohio middle school teacher.

Melissa Cairns is facing termination after posting a now-controversial photo to her personal Facebook account. In October of last year, Cairns posted a photo of some of her students with duct tape over their mouths. A caption read, “Finally found a way to get them to be quiet!!!”

After a colleague informed the school administration of the photo, Cairns was placed on paid leave. Last week, the school board voted to pursue termination and will rule on her future as an educator on January 28th.

The photo has since been deleted from her Facebook account.

According to Cairns, the whole thing was a joke. But of course, she now regrets her indiscretion.

Apparently, she gave a student a piece of tape in order to repair a broken binder. The student then jokingly placed it over her mouth.

“The other kids in the class thought it was funny also, and they proceeded to pass the tape and scissors around the class. The students, the majority of the class, ended up putting a piece of duct tape across their mouth,” said Cairns.

About 2/3 of the class reportedly participated in the picture.

“Do I feel that this one, stupid mistake should cost me the last 10 years of all the good I’ve done? Absolutely not,” Cairns told ABC 15.

The school board is not only concerned about the fact that students were duct-taped in class, but also about the privacy implication of posting their photo on Facebook.

It seems unlikely that Cairns posted this photo with any other motivation than as a joke. But this just goes to show, jokes on Facebook, especially when then involve minors, can really backfire.

Slashgear is reporting that Amazon has launched a $50 off promotion for its Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ tablets – but only for students. Anyone who is signed up with Amazon Student (using a .edu email address) for a discounted Amazon Prime membership has access to the deal. Both the Wi-Fi and 4G LTE versions of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ are eligible for the sale price, and the deal lasts throughout the month of January.

Amazon is encouraging Kindle owners to use their devices as learning tools. Amazon Student members can subscribe to Amazon Prime for $39 a year, which is slightly less than half the normal price. In addition, Amazon allows textbook rental through its Kindle tablets, and recently introduced the X-Ray feature for textbooks. X-Ray is an integrated glossary allows users to cross-reference words and passages throughout a book and on the web through Wikipedia and YouTube.

Microsoft is the latest company to adopt this student-friendly approach by making its Office 365 service dirt cheap. Office 365 is Microsoft’s new cloud-platform where users can edit Word, Excel and other Office software via Web browsers. The service normally costs $3 per month for students, but Microsoft is offering it at $1.67 per month ($80 over four years) to college students.

Beyond the cheap price, the service has some specific perks for students. Subscribers will get access to all the applications in the Office software suite including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access. A subscription lasts four years, but students can sign up for four more if their college journey takes that long.

The other perks include automatic saving to SkyDrive for all documents and an extra 20GB storage on said SkyDrive. Students will now be able to save up to 27GB worth of content across all of their projects. Skype is even getting in on the fun by offering 60 Skype world minutes a month to subscribers.

So, who’s eligible to take part in this deal? Unlike most student offers, full and part-time students can take advantage of the special pricing as long as they attend an “accredited institution.” Even better, faculty and staff at said institutions can also sign up for the service. It’s not known if faculty and staff are also held to the four year limit.

UPDATE: Microsoft just got back with us. A spokesperson said that all “eligible students, faculty or staff members can renew their 4-year subscription to Office 365 University once.” Guess that means professors can only get 8 years just like their students. Tenure doesn’t mean as much as it used to.

San Antonio school district Northside ISD is implementing new technology called “Smart” Student ID Cards. What’s so smart about them? Well, they contain RFID chips. And those RFID chips can transmit location information to the school administrators, meaning that they will know the exact whereabouts of every student, all the time.

I’m sure you’re sensing an impending controversy. One student and her father have been protesting the new program. ““It makes me uncomfortable. It’s an invasion of my privacy,” said Andrea Hernandez.

“With a smart phone you can use the option to use your locator, but this I can’t turn it off.”

She’s right. The RFID chip will be planted inside the student ID card, which students will be required to wear around their necks with a lanyard. The rules stipulate that students must wear the ID at all times while at school, and they are forced to pay a $15 fee for a replacement ID, if for any reason they “misplace” it.

In a letter from administrators at one of the participating schools, parents were told that they “expect school staff to always know where [thier] children are during the day,” and this new Smart ID helps with that.

“We want to assure you that the “smart” ID cards store no personal information, and the “smart” ID card does not work outside of the school,” said the letter.

“To ensure 100 percent implementation of the new student locator system, we are asking that you talk to your children and impress upon them the importance of this project. Please encourage your students to wear their “smart” IDs all day, every day at school, and discourage students from leaving, forgetting or exchanging tags.”

Are parents cooperating with the initiative? By and large, absolutely according to Northside ISD spokesperson Pascual Gonzalez. He told Fox News that most parents have been “supportive” of the program. Speaking of Mr. Hernandez:

“He is the lone protester. For us, this technology represents an efficient way to locate a student and to always know where our students are in our care.”

The two schools participating in the program, Jay High School and Jones Middle School, have a combined enrollment of around 4,200 students. It’s a little hard to believe that there would be only one protesting student/parent within that group.

“We have seen attemtps to use RFID’s in schools before and have opposed such efforts, not only because we don’t want to see this kind of intrusive surveillance infrastructure gain inroads into our culture, and because we should not be teaching our children to accept such an intrusive surveillance technology, but also because RFIDs are a generally insecure technology not appropriate for use with children,” says Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union.

“[T]his story in Texas is a reminder that despite the technology’s lack of security, chipping identity documents and using RFID’s to track people remains an attractive idea to those in authority. And of course, many technologies of control are imposed on prisoners, immigrants and children before anyone else.”

What do you think? Smart plan to keep kids safe and in class? Or terribly invasion of privacy?

The bundle also comes with an insert of recommended educational apps to download from Google Play. It comes at a retail value of $350 for $249.99.

Some were able to ge their hands on it early, so you can see it here:

“Students will realize substantial benefits from the bundle, which will add a physical keyboard to the device as well as a USB adapter that supports plugging in USB thumb drives as well as peripherals such USB mice,” Samsung says. “With these accessories and the preloaded Polaris Office, the GALAXY Tab 2 is perfect for typing research reports or even creating presentations. In addition, the multimedia features on the GALAXY Tab 2 are perfect for enjoying movies and music.”

“The education market is a significant priority for Samsung, and we are very pleased to deliver a bundle that is sure to be appealing to just about any student at a very competitive price point,” explained Travis Merrill, Director of Marketing, GALAXY Tab, Samsung Electronics America. “A busy student can achieve a PC-like setup in the dorm room, yet still pop the GALAXY Tab 2 out of the dock and slip it into a pocket for usage while on the go. It truly is the smarter way to learn.”

The Student Edition will go on sale beginning 09/19, and will only be available for two weeks.

The funds were dispersed in two separate grants to the National Center on Time and Learning and Clemson University totaling over $1.1 million dollars. The grants are trying to find out if “Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers.”

Thats right, the bracelet is going to determine if the students are engaged in the current discussion. kind of Orwellian don’t you think? Some other people tend to think it is a waste of money saying, “That’s more than $1.1 million that could have been spent on things that schools actually need, such as books, teachers, librarians, etc.” I don’t know if I agree with that but that is her opinion.

The study of galvanic bracelets is part of the “emerging field of neuromarketing,” which “relies on biometric technologies to determine a participant’s emotional and cognitive response to certain stimuli.”

photo courtesy of MIT technologyreview.com

The latest city to put the brakes on such activities is New York City. The city’s Education Department has released a list of guidelines for teachers to follow when it comes to social media and students, strictly prohibiting communication between teachers and students via personal pages. However, instructors are permitted to set up pages on Facebook and Twitter that are dedicated to classroom use.

The opportunity for teachers and students to communicate personally on social media still seems so near enough with that one permission that the consideration will undoubtedly still cross somebody’s mind, eventually. However, at least there’s a policy set up that dictates whether you, as an employee of NYC’s education system, are doing something wrong. The New York Times points out, though, that the new policy does nothing to discourage personal texting or even phone calls between students and teachers, which has been a more widespread problem.

So as to clarify what’s appropriate and what isn’t, in case it isn’t obvious, the city will be providing training sessions for teachers in order to demarcate ways that they can still apply social media in the classroom – something the Education Department says is a good thing – but to do it in a professional manner.

New York officials said that they chose not to prohibit all forms of direct electronic contact, and that they could still discipline teachers who used cellphones inappropriately. “The last thing we want to do is prohibit communication and prevent a teacher from helping a student in distress, even if that means making a phone call,” a spokesman, Matthew Mittenthal, said.

The new policy also recommends is that teachers utilize privacy settings on their social media pages so as to reduce the incidence of personal communication from students. Conversely, parents will have to sign consent forms for their children that grant permission for students to use the classroom-dedicated social media webpages.

The thing about all of this is, though, is that teachers and students already know it’s a bad idea to carry on a personal relationship via social media. Well, students might be in disbelief about it but teachers definitely should know. If you have to covertly communicate in personal messages, posts, tweets, texts, whatevers, that’s likely a good indicator of Things Not To Do. A fine litmus test for this problem, I propose: if the message you’re about to send to your student isn’t something you’d post publicly on their wall or tweet publicly to them, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it at all.

So how about it? Do you think this goes far enough to curb any temptation teachers and students might have to exchange personal messages on social media sites? Think the Education Department is over-reaching on this policy? Let’s have some discussion about it below.

That’s a bit too broad of a statement, but as this handy infographic shows, the use of Facebook in the classroom doesn’t harm grades that much. In fact, a high school GPA better predicts the GPA of college students than Facebook use does.

For a bit more in-depth study, they found that sharing links and checking up on friends had a positive relationship with grades. The only thing that had a negative relationship with grades was making status updates.

As a final coup de grâce to the Facebook is bad for students argument, there was no strong link between using Facebook and the amount of time students spent studying.

I can personally confirm that Facebook never impacted the amount of time that I studied. I had video games for that.

Via: OnlineEducation.net

Whether you agree with this path of least resistance and prefer some other course of action so as to amicably resolve the potential problem, there is one thing you should most certainly not do: act shady about being Facebook friends with your students by telling them to keep it on the down-low or, worse, set up fake accounts altogether in order to befriend students.

A couple of teachers in England apparently missed this policy memo and are now being investigated for maintaining inappropriate relationships with students via Facebook. One teacher who, incredibly, exchanged comments with a former pupil about posing for erotic photos over a webcam received a 12-month suspension. Another teacher received a reprimand for using a decoy account in order to interact with students via Facebook.

This isn’t exactly breaking news because everybody knows there are creeps on the Internet. That’s not even to say that these teachers are explicitly creeps; they could very well be decent humans who just happened to make some very questionable decisions this time. It happens. It’s happened in the United States, it’s surely happened elsewhere, and it’s a pretty safe bet that it will continue happening in places. But if you’re doing something that makes you self-conscious enough to try to obfuscate your actions, then what you’re doing is more than likely not a good thing.

In the world of journalism, there’s this thing called a breakfast test. It goes like this: when determining whether the material you’re about to publish is appropriate, you ask yourself, “Would this be too shocking for someone to read while eating breakfast in the morning?” The metric here is that if the material is offensive enough to cause someone to choke on their Cheerios or spit out their bacon, then you probably shouldn’t publish it.

Similarly, if you’re a teacher, consider how some of your colleagues would pass the breakfast test if they were to discover in the morning news some day that you’re being investigated for how you’ve been corresponding with your students on Facebook. If you think your colleagues might require the Heimlich maneuver upon hearing the news, then you might want to re-evaluate the importance of those Facebook interactions with your students.