Three weeks ago, Revere High School senior Caley Godino, the captain of the school’s cheerleading squad, received a tweet from her Civics teacher. The day before, the teacher’s tweet said, the turnout for the Revere city election was a shockingly low ten percent; what did the students think about that? Godino responded before school on…
Given the growing importance of technology in our world, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when the cyber- prefix invades another academic discipline. And yet, as I researched this blog post this morning, I was a little startled to realize just how long psychologists have been working the field of cyberpsychology. For the uninitiated, cyberpsychology…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In an all-too-rare victory for common sense over prurience, a Utah middle school teacher was recently informed that she will not be fired for her slightly risqué Instagram photo gallery. Mindi Jensen, who teaches at the North Sanpete Middle School in Moroni, Utah, used the pseudonym “minscakes” to post photos of herself working out, posing…
