An elementary school teacher in the Bloomfield [NJ] School District has been charged “with possessing, uploading and distributing videos and images of child pornography from his home and workplace.” Nicholas K. Schumacher, 29, had been under investigation since May 4 after the Morris County prosecutor’s office received a tip from the National Center for Missing…
Dorman High School, located in Roanoke, South Caroline (just south of Spartanburg), may now hold the record for fastest termination of a teacher accused of digital misconduct. On Tuesday, 8/18, officials at the school were told by a student that math teacher and assistant cross country coach John Sewell had been sending him sexually explicit…
Back in June, I wrote about the case of Patrick Newman, a Social Studies teacher at Trinity High School, an all-boys Catholic school in Louisville, KY. Following a tip by Twitter to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, investigators determined that Newman had used Vine (a video app owned by Twitter), Kik, and…
2015-08-19 Cyberethics for Educators from Frederick Lane I had the pleasure of returning to lecture in San Bernardino approximately six months after my first visit. During that time, the name of the organization, Southern California School Risk Management, has been shortened by dropping the “Southern,” to reflect that the fact that the organization is now…
One of the great things about writing about the impact of technology on law and society is that there is a seemingly endless supply of innovations that address problems that we didn’t know we had. Often, as we’ll see, these innovations employ creative interpretations of existing law to justify their existence (or at least their…
A 15-year-old student at Glastonbury High School in Glastonbury, CT plead guilty on August 14 to two counts of criminal impersonation and was given a two-year suspended prison sentence and two years of probation. In April, Eddie Matos was arrested on charges that he solicited nude Snapchat photos from teen boys and men using a…
Unless you’ve been living under a fairly large rock for the past few months, you are probably aware of the fact that former Secretary of State (and Democratic presidential candidate) Hillary Clinton has been in a little bit of hot water over the fact that she set up and used a private email server in…
According to a recently-released study by the Department of Psychology at Drexel University, nearly 9 out of 10 readers of this blog post (87.8%) have “sent or received a sexually suggestive message over the internet at some point in their lives.” And what’s more, you almost certainly think that sexting is awesome — 95.9% of…
It’s been a disturbing couple of months at Evergreen High School in Vancouver, WA. In mid-June, science teacher Matthew Morasch was caught trying to shoot upskirt videos of female students. Now comes the news that Stephanie McCrea, a married theater and English teacher at Evergreen High, pleaded guilty on July 30 “to four counts of…
In general, the issues that I cover in this blog are fairly apolitical — there’s not a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to cyberbullying, cyberharrassment, or digital misconduct by educators. But when it comes to privacy and issues of national security, political divisions inevitably creep into the discussion. The first…
