A 38-year-old Mora High School teacher named Benjamin Rossow is facing 17 charges of interference with privacy following the discovery that Rossow used his school-issued iPad to take so-called “creepshots” of numerous female students. As the Washington Post explained last fall, creepshots “are essentially just what they sound like: sneaky, surreptitious photos of a person’s,…
Burlesque — or at least the tassled-and-g-stringed version that arose in America — hit its peak of popularity in the early 20th century, before a combination of Prohibition and adult movie theaters largely wiped it out. Over the last twenty years or so, however, there has been a growing revival of the art form that…
A goofy but reportedly “innocent” photo posted to Instagram has landed a Rochester (PA) Area School District teacher in hot water. At the District’s prom in May, high school chemistry teacher Amy Douglas posed for a photograph with two female students. According to the description published by a local Web site, BeaverCountian.com, the photo clearly…
At the 2014 Annual Conference of the Family Online Safety Institute, I had the pleasure of meeting of Ken Corish, the Senior Manager responsible for Compliance and the UK Safer Internet Centre at the South West Grid for Learning, a not-for-profit charitable trust in the United Kingdom that provides a wide range of products, services…
Unlike most of the entries in this blog that involve teacher misconduct, this is not a story that begins or ends with high-tech malfeasance. It does, however, offer an unusually well-documented example of the role that emotional vulnerabilities can play in contributing to the various types of cybertraps that snare so many educators. According to…
Uh-oh! Jonny Can Read From a family acceptable use perspective, things start to get rapidly more challenging in grades 2-4. Three significant developments occur that will change your child’s relationship to electronic devices: First, he or she will learn to read, spell, and hunt-and-peck on a keyboard, all of which means that your child can…
Where’s My Phone? Who Took My Tablet? In a remarkably short time (thanks in large part to Steve Jobs and Apple), we’ve transitioned from “Don’t touch Dad’s computer” to “Do you want to read a Sesame Street book on the iPad?” My sons were toddlers in the mid- to late 1990s, and seeing them heading…
I tell you three times: camera phones are the most significant driver of social change since the early 1960s, when television brought the street battles over civil rights into nearly every American home. We are only just beginning to appreciate the myriad ways in which the constant presence of camera phones is changing our society,…
It was with special interest that I watched last night’s segment of the John Oliver show, “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” In the middle of last week, I received a call from one of the show’s researchers, and had an interesting discussion about various state and federal laws that might apply to revenge porn,…
Marinko Jankovic, a 61-year-old teacher at Berwick Secondary College in Berwick, Australia (just down the road from Melbourne) is facing six months in jail on charges of surreptitiously taking upskirt photographs and videos of female students in his classroom. Although he pleaded guilty to making 106 videos over a four-year period and to possession of…
