Coalition Calls for Modernizing COPPA

A coalition of child health, consumer, and privacy advocates submitted formal documents to the Federal Trade Commission last week recommending modernizations to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which essentially restricts websites from collecting data on children under 13 without parental consent.

Suggestions include using criteria the FTC developed in 2008 for food marketing to clarify the definition of sites and content "directed at children," updating the definition of "personal information" to reflect how Web addresses, geographic location data, and even age and zip code can be used to target young online users, and creating a separate set of privacy protections for children 13 and older.

Protections for older adolescents, said the coalition in a release, should not include the parental consent model used in the current law that protects younger children.

It's unclear the effect the proposed reforms would have on online or blended learning programs. Most online education programs have pretty rigid parental consent stipulations already, but commercial vendors who provide online content or services to school districts may have to make revisions to their products to align with COPPA standards. For example, in a story I wrote about districts that were paying to equip school buses with WiFi Internet, one company that wired buses had to create an Internet filtering system to comply with COPPA standards.

Nobody is questioning the spirit of the COPPA. But in cyberspace terms, the law passed in 1998 and enacted in 2000 is ancient. When it was finally enacted, we were still four years away from Facebook and six from Twitter. And using phone services to connect to the Internet meant hooking your computer to a land line and a dial-up modem, not exploring the Web from a mobile device.

The FTC had already launched a review of the rules this spring, "in light of the rapidly evolving technology and changes in the way children use and access the Internet." After a recent extension of the review period, it is scheduled to end next Monday.

Raising a Generation of Digital Citizens

Digital citizenship is a multi-faceted and essential piece of student curriculum, says Mike Ribble, the district director of technology for the Manhattan-Ogden school district in Kansas and author of multiple books on the subject.

Teaching kids to be responsible digital citizens goes beyond just talking about cyberbullying, Ribble explained in a session here at the ISTE conference in Denver. It also includes subjects like sexting, texting while driving, illegal downloading, and understanding what's OK to share and what information should remain private. "We have so much technology, but do we use the tool between our ears?" Ribble asked. Considering how young kids are when they start encountering technology, the conversations need to start at home, said Ribble, but there's a big role for educators, as well, in teaching students how to be ethical and responsible users of technology both in and out of school.

One way to prepare students to be good digital citizens is to start scaffolding the curriculum into subject areas, said Ribble. He proposed starting by talking with kindergarteners about digital communication, reaching digital rights and responsibilities by 4th grade, and even dealing with issues of digital commerce by the time students leave middle school. All the subjects in the scaffolded curriculum should be touched on each year, but by focusing on one area per year, students can begin to dig into the more complex subjects at appropriate times, says Ribble.

For further reading, Ribble recommended the report "Youth Safety on a Living Internet," written by the Online Safety and Technology Working Group. Also, parents may find resources about how to talk to their children about digital citizenship at the DigiParent social-networking site.

Citing the Real Author, Not Mr. Google

Putting its stamp on another hot topic at the ISTE 2010 ed-tech conference in Denver, the International Society for Technology in Education on Wednesday explained an evolving web-literacy curriculum developed with Microsoft and gathered feedback from conference-goers.

Critical Thinking In the Classroom focuses on teaching students to be responsible cyber researchers. The lessons, which can be downloaded for free, are available at three ability levels and are broken into five units: the mechanics of searching, validity and reliability, plagiarism, citing Web sources, and civil discourse.

Chris O'Neal, the ISTE faculty member who collaborated on the curriculum, said the program is aimed at changing the habits of students who have a quick Internet trigger, but not a natural skepticism of what they find on the other end of the search field barrel or an awareness of where it comes from. Some younger students, he said, even think everything they find on a search engine is the search engine's own content.

"We asked [students], 'Would you make life decisions based on the first [Web] page that comes up?'" O'Neal said. "And some kids really said, 'Well, it depends what the question is.' "

The ISTE-Microsoft venture comes at a time when digital responsibility is becoming a topic of national—and federal—discussion. The National Broadband Plan, released in March by the Federal Communications Commission, is calling for increased focus on digital literacy. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education and Karen Cator, its director of education technology, want students to gain a grasp of digital citizenship, the concept of understanding and evaluating your actions as a member of a digital community. The ISTE-Microsoft curriculum scratches the surface of those issues in its civil discourse unit.

"When we posed these questions to a whole bunch of media specialists in the country, that's something that came back," O'Neal said. "Kids have a real hard time being in blogs and being civil. ... They're reading a statement someone says as truth, and getting really, really ticked off about it."

Other organizations are developing curricula that more thoroughly tackle the citizenship issue. Look for a blog post about one of them when the conference disperses and yours truly is back at EdWeek's Bethesda, Md., headquarters.

Mobile Learning for All?

Within five years, every student in every school in the country will be using a mobile device for learning, predicts Elliot Soloway, who also proclaims that "mobile technologies are bigger than the Internet."

Soloway, a professor at the University of Michigan and co-founder of the mobile learning company GoKnow!, spoke on a panel at the ISTE conference here in Denver with his GoKnow! colleague Cathleen Norris, a professor at the University of North Texas, and three district-level administrators who have put in place mobile learning initiatives in their schools.

In the session, panelists emphasized the importance of administrative and community buy-in before launching a 1-to-1 mobile learning initiative. Susan Tomko, the director of information systems at the North Rockland Central School District in New York, told attendees that her district engaged in discussions with parents and the community for roughly two years before launching a pilot program with 80 mobile learning devices last year. Kyle Menchhofer, the technology coordinator for the St. Mary's City Schools in Ohio, mentioned that one form of financial support came directly from his district's parent teacher organization, in addition to funding from businesses and organizations in his community.

Darlene Rankin, the technology project manager at Katy Independent School District in Texas, noted that her district was expanding its public wifi in the future to allow students to bring their own mobile devices and connect to the school's filtered network.

All the panelists agreed that students and teachers were more engaged when using the mobile learning devices and found that incorporating them into classrooms helped differentiate instruction as well as level the playing field for students who may not have access to computers and the Internet at home. However, Soloway also pointed out that the price points for data plans for mobile devices do need to come down before widespread adoption can take place.

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