Over the last couple of years, I’ve dived deeply into the topic of teacher misconduct. The cases I’ve studied and summarized have ranged widely, from the merely sad to the reprehensible to the truly horrifying. One thing is abundantly clear: we need to improve teacher candidate education and professional development to better instruct educators about…
The annual conference of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) is being held in Washington, DC this week, and as usual, it is has been an energizing and thought-provoking experience. FOSI Founder and CEO Steven Balkam and his staff do a terrific job of putting together a compelling slate of presentations on some of the…
Over the past six months, the Utah Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force conducted an investigation into the online activities of Jeffrey Thomas Patterson, a seventh-grade science teacher at the West Hills Middle School in West Jordan, Utah (a suburb of Salt Lake City). On Wednesday, November 4, law enforcement officials executed a search warrant…
2015-11-11 Cybertraps for Educators [webinar] from Frederick Lane An online presentation for the Independent Schools Association of the Central States on November 11, 2015. If you are interested in discussing a presentation or professional development program for your organization on this topic, please contact me for information regarding my rates and availability.
On Wednesday, October 28, a freshman at Mulberry High School in Mulberry, FL approached her teacher’s desk to ask a question about classwork that had been assigned. As she neared Vadi Velez-Gonzalez’s desk, she could see his iPhone lying face-up on his desk, and was shocked to see it displaying images of adult gay pornography.…
State College, PA has had its share of unpleasant headlines recently (see, e.g. “Sandusky, Jerry“). Now come reports that Wesley Amy, a State College Area High School computer science teacher, has been convicted by a jury of offering students good grades in exchange for nude photos. The 28-year-old educator began teaching computer science at the…
2015-11-03 Teaching Digital Citizenship to Digital Natives from Frederick Lane A Featured Presentation delivered at the Schools of the Future Conference in Honolulu, HI on November 3 and 4, 2015. If you are interested in discussing a presentation or professional development program for your organization on this topic, please contact me for information regarding my…
A long-time Chicago middle school teacher, who sparked an international manhunt after fleeing sexual assault charges, was sentenced on Thursday, November 5, to 50 years in prison. “You earned every day of it,” Judge Daniel Shanes told 42-year-old Michael Vucic, an 18-year veteran at Gavin South Middle School in Ingleside, IL. An arrest warrant was…
2015-10-30 Minimizing the Risk of Cybertraps for Educators from Frederick Lane A presentation delivered to the Massachusetts Association of School Personnel Administrators on October 30, 2015 in Shrewsbury, Mass. Earlier in the MASPA meeting, four attorneys from the Office of Professional Practices Investigations in the Legal Office of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary…
Three students at Ponderosa High School in Ponderosa, CA are now facing child pornography charges following two separate incidents over the past two weeks. In a press release issued on October 17, the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office announced the discovery a sexually explicit video involving three minors: On October 14, 2015, at Ponderosa High…
