Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:44:00 GMT
The internet is a powerful and cost-effective way to distribute information to a large group of people. This is especially true for schools. A school can post their schedule online where students and parents can get up-to-date information quickly and easily. It is hard to imagine any school not having their own website today with some sort of schedule information on it.
But there have concerns raised recently about who has access to this information. Just as this information is available for viewing by the student body, it is also viewable by those who don’t have the best of intentions. Predators can have easy access to information such as what time school gets out or where a field trip might take place.
Famundo solves this problem by providing multiple layers of permissions (5 layers to be exact) to their online calendar solution, so only those given permission have viewing access.
How does this work? A school creates a Members Group that has a single sign in and password.
This information is distributed to the student body, which can then log in to see their schedules. No one without the sign in and password would be able to view it. A new Members Group can be created every year or as often as necessary.
The default view access for events should be set for All Staff and Members Only, so that going forward, any events will only be viewable by someone who has the correct sign in and password.
For those events that you want viewable by the public, such as a concert or sporting event, can be set on the fly when creating the event.
We would love to hear from you about any ideas or suggestions on ways you have used Famundo to solve problems within your family or organization. Thank you.
Posted in Internet Safety, School, Famundo | Tags calendars, education, privacy, school, student | no comments
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Wed, 07 Feb 2007 16:44:00 GMT
The Wall Street Journal reports that MySpace is planning to offer free parental notification software
Parents who install the monitoring software on their home computers would be able to find out what name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace. The software doesn’t enable parents to read their child’s e-mail or see the child’s profile page and children would be alerted that their information was being shared. The program would continue to send updates about changes in the child’s name, age and location, even when the child logs on from other computers
Here is the way the software, code named Zephyr, works.
A parent can download the free software onto his or her home computers. The software will identify any user who logs onto MySpace from those computers and collect his or her user name, age, and hometown. That information will be stored on the hard drive and parents (actually, whoever has the administrative privileges on that computer) can access it using a password. That information is also publicly available to anyone who visits MySpace’s Web site, but many parents have trouble locating their kids’ profile pages because kids often don’t use their real names.
Of course, this might be too little too late and may have the effect of turning off many of it’s younger users, who are moving to social networking sites like FaceBook and Xanga.
It will be interesting to see how this all shakes down. To read the entire article, click here.
Posted in Internet Safety | no comments
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:41:37 GMT
An interesting article in the Washington Post about social networking sites and their fickle teen audience. What was hot last year is now so not hot.
Take Xanga, the hot social networking site before MySpace: In October 2002, the typical Xanga user spent an average of 1 hour and 39 minutes a month on the site, a figure that declined steadily, reaching only 11 minutes last month, according to Nielsen-NetRatings. Friendster, another older site, hit its first usage peak of 1 hour and 51 minutes in October 2003, and then hit another peak of 3 hours and 3 minutes in February 2006. But last month, the average user was on Friendster for a mere 7 minutes.
MySpace usage ramped up heavily during its first year and a half, hitting 2 hours and 25 minutes in October last year. Then it dropped to about 2 hours and held relatively steady there for the past year. Facebook, a younger networking site, is still on a gradual incline, reaching 1 hour and 9 minutes last month .
Read the article here.
Posted in Internet Safety | Tags MySpace | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Wed, 25 Oct 2006 20:03:27 GMT
We just had our annual parent meeting at our daughter’s middle school this week and, as we did last year, we ended the meeting with, for lack of a better term, a parent covenant. This is where parents agree to set limits on what our children are allowed to and not allowed to do, especially when it involves activities that include other children in the class.
This provides a real safety net when your children are having a sleepover or visiting a friend, you know that the other family has agreed to certain standards won’t be broken. It makes a very powerful statement when you can tell your child that the parents in the class have decided this as a group that some activity is not acceptable.
It is interesting how the concerns of parents have changed over the years with changes in technology . Although the Internet and e-mail is still a concern, there was much more discussion over issues like social networking sites, such as MySpace, and text messaging. These weren’t even on the radar when our son started middle school three years ago.
You can read my post regarding last year’s meeting here.
We are very appreciative that our school provides this opportunity and actually encourages this dialog among the parents.
Posted in Internet Safety, Family Life, Setting Limits | Tags Internet_safety, parenting, setting_limits | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:55:00 GMT
I am very excited that Jim Steyer, founder of CommonSenseMedia, will be speaking at my son’s school next week. His talk is on The “Internet: Do You Understand How Much It Affects Your Children, How It’s Changing Their Lives and What You Can Do about It.” I’m very interested to hear his perspective on this topic especially now that I have a high schooler.
In case you are not familiar with CommonSenseMedia, get familiar. It is an incredibly valuable tool for parents, on topics covering all media, including the internet, movies TV.
You can sign up for their weekly e-newsletter, which covers all the latest releases.
I’ll report back after I hear his talk.
Posted in Internet Safety, Setting Limits, Technology | Tags internet, monitoring, online, predators, safety, web | no comments | no trackbacks
