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.

Making Sense of Digital Literacy Education

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.

School IT Use Falls Short, Survey Says

Educators have more work to do to meet student expectations of ideal classroom technology integration, says a survey by CDW-G released at the ISTE conference here in Denver.

The report from the Vernon Hills, Ill.-based education technology provider surveyed 1,000 administrators, students, and teachers. It found that 84 percent of students agreed that technology was important to their ability to work on class assignments, but only 57 percent thought their school was preparing them to use technology in college or the workforce.

The results of the survey were discussed Tuesday during a panel here featuring four IT administrators from districts around the country.

Part of the disconnect stems from how technology is used in the classroom, the survey found. For example, 60 percent of students said their teachers used technology to teach, but only 26 percent said that they were encouraged by teachers to use technology during class to learn.

One of the biggest discrepancies came from the technologies that students and teachers used at home versus the technologies they used in school. Seventy-six percent of students reported using social media tools, which are routinely blocked by school districts, for educational use outside school. Yet almost all the technologies that students regularly use, such as MP3 players, smartphones, online chats, blogs, and podcasts, were rarely used in the classroom, the survey found.

That's a disconnect that has to change, said Rob Mancabeli, the IT administrator at Hunterdon Central School District in New Jersey. In his district, students are encouraged to use Facebook, MySpace, chat software, and other social media tools during school, he said. Students in his district use the online video tool Skype to practice speaking Spanish with students in South America, he said. And during class lectures, students in the district's 1-to-1 computing classes participate in chats in which they can pose questions to their classmates about the lessons.

Bridging the gap between the technologies that kids are using at home to work on homework and those schools allow them to use in the classroom is an essential step to preparing today's students for higher education and the workforce, the panelists said.

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