In April, Charles Clay Dawson, a teacher at Wanette Public Schools in Pottawatomie County, was charged with soliciting nude photos from two female students, one aged 16 and the other aged 15. According to the investigative report, the 43-year-old Dawson solicited the photos from the students using standard text messaging and the KIK messaging app.…
Earlier this summer, I was interviewed by by Becky Yerak (@beckyyerak), the Business Reporter for the Chicago Tribune, about a patent issued to Allstate Insurance Company under the innocuous-sounding name “Motor Vehicle Operating Data Collection Analysis.” As I wrote at the time, the patent raises significant privacy issues. If you want to get the most…
In a brief, one-sentence order, the United States Supreme Court rejected a request by a Kentucky county clerk to stay a U.S. District Court ruling that ordered her to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In the months following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that same-sex couples have a constitutional…
For several weeks over the course of the early summer, former Oklahoma teacher Jennifer Caswell and former Utah teacher Brianne Altice waited anxiously to find out what their punishment would be after entering guilty pleas to charges of sex with underage students. Their wait is now over. Earlier this spring, I wrote about Caswell’s case…
It has been difficult to concentrate today, following the horrifying news that 24-year-old reporter Alison Parker and her 27-year-old cameraman, Adam Ward, were assassinated on live television by a disgruntled former employee of WDB7, the local Roanoke news station for which they worked. It has been difficult to concentrate because I have worked as a…
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…
