Digital+Footprints

[|Plagiarism, Copyright]

A wonderful resource for digital literacy-[|Commonsense Media] For example: [|My Online Community for younger students] [|Safety/Digital Footsteps for older students]

Research on safety
[|NYT article] [|Forbes] To me, that seems like the equivalent of blaming playgrounds or Disney world for making kids easy to find. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. “When the backdrop of a crime is novel technology, there’s a tendency to assign as much blame to the tool as the wielder. **The truth is, pedophiles troll parks, too, and we don’t talk about closing them down,” wrote James Temple at the [|San Francisco Chronicle].** In fact, the belief that the Internet is full of dangerous digital playgrounds — leading to more crimes against children — may be inaccurate. In a report on what various companies are doing to try to make their technologies safer for kids, Reuters [|notes] that the rise of Internet use by kids has coincided with decreased reports of sexual crimes against them. By some measures, Internet-related sex crimes against children have always been rare and are now falling (as are reports of assaults on minors that do not involve the Net). Most sex crimes against children are committed by people the children know, rather than strangers. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children processed 3,638 reports of online “enticement” of children by adults last year, down from 4,053 in 2010 and 5,759 in 2009.
 * “We very much believe the technology is not to blame,” says Rebecca Dreke of the National Center for Victims of Crime, which tracks sexual crimes against children. “But rather how it’s used.”**