Here are a couple of stats that caught my eye.

54% of teens were texting daily in September of last year and half of teens send more than 50 messages a day.

I will say I’m not surprised.  For the past three months I’ve been filling in as interim principal for the JP Knapp Early College High School here in Currituck County.  The vast majority of students have cell phones and they know how to use them!  This has changed the whole landscape of investigating incidents that happen at school.  Twelve years ago when I was a high school principal it took at least a class period for news to circulate throughout the student body.  Now it is just seconds.  A student can leave my office, and before they get back to class, have texted groups of students with whatever the latest drama might be.  Not only that, now I don’t have to call as many parents because the students text their parents and the parents call me before I get the chance to call.

Gotta love cell phones!

The live binder is linked below.   The PowerPoint and Internet Safety Agreement are available by joining the Google Group.

According to a recent news report, it is girls.

“According to a study published on US Department of Health and Human Services’ website www.stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov, “girls were about twice as likely as boys to be victims and perpetrators of cyber bullying…”

The website linked above has great resources for working with kids on cyberbullying issues.

Tomorrow my session is basically a quick survey of internet sites and tools.  The title is “Keeping up the Joneses, and everyone else online”.  The handout is here.

“In December 2009, a major password breach occurred that led to the release of 32 million passwords1. Further, the hacker posted to the Internet the full list of the 32 million passwords (with no other identifiable information).”

Here is a list of the five most common passwords.

1. 123456

2. 12345

3. 123456789

4. password

5. iloveyou

We all know the challenge.  The tougher a password is for someone else to guess, the tougher it is for us to remember.  Here are a few tips for creating strong passwords.

1. Use capital and lower case letter

2. Use numbers and special symbols

3. Make the password at least 8 characters long

Here is a strategy that I have used to create a password that is hard to guess and easy to remember.  Think of a sentence and use the first letter from each word to form the password.  For example, “I love to read books and visit facebook”, becomes the password Il2rb&vf.  That could be the password for facebook.  For ebay I could use “I love to read books and visit Ebay” or Il2rb&ve.  Get the picture?  You have a strong password, 8 characters, includes a capital letter, a number, and a special symbol.  This lets you have a unique password for each website and still have a pattern to help you remember.

First is a survey of teens from Harris Interactive.  ” In total, the Cox Communications funded survey found that nineteen percent of teens surveyed go online via their cell phone and 19 percent say their parents are unaware. The vast majority of teens (80 percent) whose parent know they go online via their cell phone say they are not given any limits or controls — far fewer than are given boundaries on their desktop PC or laptop.”  Combine this with the finding that 19% of teens have engaged in sexting (sending, receiving or forwarding sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude photos through text message or email) and you can see the potential for problems.

The second survey found that 60% of teens who text admit to texting while driving.  This is definately a big risk for teens as driving while texting (DWT) is potentially as dangerous as DWI.

Finally, there is a Nielsen report that suggests teens’ use of media is not that terribly different from adults’ use of media.  Here are a couple of myths and realities from the survey.

Myth: Teens use media—10 screens at  a time.  Reality: Teens are more likely than adults to use their media one at a time.

Myth: Teens are abandoning TV for  new media.  Reality: Wrong. They’re watching more TV than ever.

This study is excellent reading and it comes to a not too surprising conclusion.  “When it comes to media, teens are not as radically different (from adults) as some think.”

What does all this mean for those of us who are responsible for teaching, training, and caring for teens?  We need to be actively talking with them about potential dangers but we have more in common than we think.