Our family's digital footprints and more...

This week I spent quite a bit of time going over internet safety. I liked Doug Johnson's article,“Staying Safe on the Read-Write Web” in particular. It just makes so much sense to me. The points he makes were driven further home when I talked to a couple of SLMS last week. They are frustrated by internet filters that filter out web 2.0 tools that could lead to perfectly legitimate teaching sites...all because of scared and misinformed adults. Can the damage that CIPA has brought be reversed? I agree with Doug that the opportunity to teach students how to use these tools responsibly has been largely lost now.

I spent time googling the name of each person in our family. I've done that in the past, but not in a while. I'm happy to say, that we all have clean digital footprints. I was surprised to find my husband's name on the blog of an entire stranger. No,...it wasn't creepy! It was because my husband played the piano in the background of a couple of recordings that a friend of his, a local Christian musician and song writer had made during the 1980's. Eventually he published his collection of music. The blogger writes reviews of Christian music (well known artists...and not so well known artists). He wrote down all the names of the musicians involved when he reviewed the collection that my husband's friend had created. The good news is that he liked the music!

I was also shocked to find there were 100's of hits for the name of my 10 year old daughter! Does she live a double life? Does she look like an innocent little girl? You decide. I thought she was just playing with her American Girl dolls in the other room! Who knew? Actually, almost all of the hits were for some woman of the same name who must live in a Hispanic country since everything was written in Spanish. This was no problem at all thanks to my new and improved google searching tools. I was able to eliminate all but one hit...which brought me down to 3 hits for my little girl. What was mentioned? She won a "character counts" banner design contest a few years ago in her school district and she competed in a local 5k race.

I also ought to state that I took the time during this exercise to explain what I was doing to my children and why. This naturally brought up the topic of how we must be careful about what we put on the web. I gave them examples of the mistakes of others. I think it was a good discussion.

I've been brainstorming with the girls in my collaboration group, creating a list of things that a good library web site must include. I think we are off to a good start. I like working in groups. There is strength in numbers. What I didn't think of, they did. Also, as a result of trying out Google Docs, I can see many possibilities for its use in education.

I also started the iSafe curriculum.