“systematically organized material designed to provide a specific level of instruction in a subject matter category.” The board interpreted this section “… to allow school corporations to use computers and other data devices, instructional software, internet resources, interactive, magnetic and other media, and other ’systematically organized material.’ As technology continues to evolve, Indiana’s broad and inclusive definition of a textbook will enable districts to evolve in their use of such materials, whether packaged for them or packaged by them.”

Read the Open Letter to Indiana Educators About Textbooks.

You can read more about it in this article.

Should we follow Indiana’s lead or are they off base?

Cyber Bullying Policy
GCA strives to provide a safe, positive learning climate for students. Therefore, it shall be the policy of GCA to maintain an educational environment in which bullying and cyber bullying in any form are not tolerated.

All forms of bullying and cyber bullying by school district students are hereby prohibited.  Anyone who engages in bullying or cyber bullying in violation of this Policy shall be subject to appropriate discipline.

Students who have been bullied or cyber bullied shall promptly report such incidents to any staff member. Complaints of bullying or cyber bullying shall be investigated promptly, and corrective action shall be taken when a complaint is verified.  Neither reprisals nor retaliation shall occur as a result of the submission of a complaint.

GCA shall annually inform students that bullying or cyber bullying of students will not be tolerated.

Definitions:

Bullying shall mean unwelcome verbal, written or physical conduct directed at a student by another student that has the effect of:

1. Physically, emotionally or mentally harming a student;
2. Damaging, extorting or taking a student’s personal property;
3. Placing a student in reasonable fear of physical, emotional or mental harm;
4. Placing a student in reasonable fear of damage to or loss of personal property; or
5. Creating an intimidating or hostile environment that substantially interferes with a student’s educational opportunities.

Cyber bullying includes, but is not limited to, the following misuses of technology:  harassing, teasing, intimidating, threatening, or terrorizing another student or staff member by way of any technological tool, such as sending or posting inappropriate or derogatory email messages, instant messages, text messages, digital pictures or images, or website postings (including blogs) which has the effect of:

1. Physically, emotionally or mentally harming a student;
2. Placing a student in reasonable fear of physical, emotional or mental harm;
3. Placing a student in reasonable fear of damage to or loss of personal property; or
4. Creating an intimidating or hostile environment that substantially interferes with a student’s educational opportunities.

All forms of bullying are unacceptable and, to the extent that such actions are disruptive of the educational process of GCA, offenders shall be subject to appropriate staff intervention, which may result in administrative discipline.

The term “bullying” and “cyber bullying” shall not be interpreted to infringe upon a student’s right to engage in legally protected speech or conduct.

Delegation of Responsibility:

• Each staff member shall be responsible to maintain an educational environment free of bullying and cyber bullying.
• Each student shall be responsible to respect the rights of his/her fellow students and to ensure an atmosphere free from all forms of bullying and cyber bullying.
• Students shall be encouraged to report bullying or cyber bullying complaints to any staff member.
• Any staff member who receives a bullying or cyber bullying complaint shall gather information or seek administrative assistance to determine if bullying or cyber bullying has occurred.  The principal or his/her designee will inform the parents or guardians of the victim and also the parents or guardians of the accused.

Complaint Procedure:

• A student shall report a complaint of bullying or cyber bullying, orally or in writing, to a staff member. If a parent initiates the complaint, the appropriate staff member will follow-up with the student.
• The staff member will either gather the information or seek administrative assistance to determine if the alleged bullying or cyber bullying conduct occurred.

A violation of this Policy shall subject the offending student to appropriate disciplinary action, consistent with the student discipline code, which may include suspension, expulsion or notification to the appropriate authorities.

The magic lay in his ring.  Each time a difficult case was brought before him he would listen carefully and attentively to each person as they spoke.  When they were finished he would open a locket on his ring and stare deeply into it for quite some time.  As he did so, the room would quiet and everyone would wonder what the king was seeing in his magical ring. Suddenly the king would snap the ring closed and issue a decision that amazed everyone in the room.

Everybody wanted to know what was in that ring?  Did the king see visions?  Were there spirits that spoke to him?  But the king wouldn’t let anyone see inside the ring – no matter how they asked.

As happens on this earth, the wise and just king grew old.  As he lay on his death bed his courtiers and family gathered around him to pay their respects and to say goodbye.  When the king closed his eyes and breathed his last there was a moment of silence in the room.  The one of his closest advisors gently reached out, took his hand, and opened the ring.

All that was inside the locket was this inscription:  “This to shall pass.”

You can also put full, interactive panoramas of the your campus online and then embed them in your website. Here’s a link to a panorama I did of the Upper Columbia Academy campus.

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=6628

Once you are viewing the panorama, you can click the link to view it in Google Earth – It’s really cool as you can zoom in to detail in any area of the panorama. You can also embed the panorama in your own web site.

At the bottom of this page is a Google Earth link to the UCA campus where you can see blue dots representing pictures of various places on campus.  The blue dot is the place from which the picture was taken. Oh and these images can now be turned on in Google Maps (ours aren’t showing yet, but will be there soon).

It’s a good idea to be proactive in putting pictures online that are representative of your campus.  Not only is it good marketing, but we had a problem with someone putting a nice picture with a derogatory title online.  Panoramio removed it but it took several months for the change to take effect. Once you tag your pictures in Panoramio and geotag* them it takes about 2-3 months for them to show up in Google Earth.

To get started with Panoramio, visit http://www.panoramio.com/.  If you need help learning how to upload and geotag your photos, just click on the “help” link at the bottom of the page.

Oh, it is also possible to link your Wikipedia page in Google Earth!**  You will see ours as a purple dot in the middle of campus.  It’s worth investing some time in editing your Wikipedia page.  Don’t make it a duplicate of your web site, but include enough information to inform.

Have fun in Google Earth!

* Geotagging is the the process of placing GPS coordinates with online pictures.

** To have your Wikipedia page show up in Google Earth, simply edit your Wikipedia page and ad a line like the one below at the end of the page – just remember to replace the coordinate with your school’s decimal Coordinates.  Don’t know them?  Have you of your students help you find it!
{{Mapit-US-cityscale|47.413336|-117.367576}}

Google Earth link to the UCA campus – Right click link and select “Save Link As” or “Save Target As.”

Download and install Google Earth

Plugging the holes

One of the areas that concerned us was online circumventors.  These sites allow student to enter the address of the web site to which they would like to view and it will display the site.  All the content filter will see is the circumventor site.  There are thousands of sites like this with more being added daily.  Some use the https protocol which makes it even more difficult to detect.  If students have easy access to circumventors, you really have no content filtering at all.  We also needed a solution that would actively block these circumventors even if they were added on a daily basis.
After investigation we decided to purchase an IR3000 for 8e6 Technologies.  Some of the features we found useful and unique were:

• Pattern Blocking of circumventor and gaming web sites.  The pattern blocking blocks circumventor or “proxy” sites based on the pattern of the connection – even if they are not in the “filtered lists.”
• Forces Yahoo and Google safe search.  We have blocked all other major image search sites.
• X-strikes Blocking.  Locks down a user’s workstation when administrator-defined thresholds for accessing inappropriate Web sites are exceeded.
• Ability to block uncategorized sites in the dorm rooms.  If a site has not been categorized it can be accessed in the labs, but not in the dorm rooms.

Conclusion

After using this for one year, we have greatly reduced the incidents of AUP violations in the dorms.  Monitoring of sites accessed has become much less of a burden and reports of circumventor use has dropped completely off and student say they don’t even try to get around the firewall because they are not successful.  While no solution will ever by 100% effective we have found the 8e6 IR3000 solution to take the nightmare out of AUP enforcement while providing open and flexible internet access to students.

Less than a year and a half ago, the Conferences, Unions , and the NAD put a tremendous amount of money into a meeting of Adventist educators called the NAD Teacher’s Convention. The keynote address a this convention was delivered by George Knight. For those of you that were there, you remember a deep, thought provoking look at these very challenge being discussed here. Many of the breakout sessions provided opportunities to look at these issues. I’ve looked online for the text of the speech, or a recording of it, but haven’t found it.

In April of 2001 they held the International Conference on The Seventh-day Adventist Philosophy of Education. George Knight also presented there with similar themes. His presentation at that event as well as other items published by him can be found here:
The Aims of Adventist Education in Historical Perspective
The Devil Takes a Look at Adventist Education
More at Circle: http://circle.adventist.org/search/?search_type=all&search_query=george+knight

The title of the another item, Online resources provided to help teacher and schools be better: (yes, that’s us)
Adventist Education Forum (yes, that’s us)
Circle
Journey to Excellence
Technology and Distance Education Committee resources

Speaking of resources, did you know that the NAD has provided ever school with free licenses to WordPerfect office and other Corel software? Oh, and I just heard that they have purchased Encyclopedia Britannica online for each Adventist School and Student – at no cost to the schools.

Just last school year a NAD Marketing meeting was held with representatives from Conferences and schools across North America studying how to better market our schools as we face the challenges we have been talking about here.

I’m sure there is more than this, but that’s what comes to mind at the moment.

I think it important to remember though, that we are not fighting against apathetic parents, church bureaucracy, or unprofessional teachers. We are fighting against the Host of Darkness who knows just how valuable our our young people are! Prayer is the first line of attack.

Secondly, as Tom said so well in his posting on The Ants, what are we doing? We can meet until our seats our sore, talk until our mouths are dry, but if we don’t act with the information we have with the resources available to us… well as the saying goes, “If we do what we’ve always done, we’ll be where we’ve always been.”

I ruled out all of those. Do those things contribute to a strong campus and strong culture? Yes. Do they cause it? No, they are symptoms. The culture of a campus, or any institution for that matter, is created by the staff of that campus. We are blessed here at UCA to have some staff who have been here, 8, 10, 15, and almost 20 years. Each of these staff members, no matter how long they have been here, contribute to the culture of the institution – both the culture the students see, and the interpersonal culture of the staff. Some staff add tremendously to the culture, from the coach who take no gruff from any student – but they all know he loves them, to the cook who loves the kids and does everything possible to have great food the kids will eat.

But we are all human. Each of us also subtracts something from the culture as well. Maybe it’s our intolerance to change, our harshness in the classroom, our oversensitivity to things that annoy us in other staff members, or maybe our expectation of absolute perfection in others. No matter how we justify our position, we all subtract something.

Take a look around at your school, church, or even family. I think you will find this law of culture to hold true. As I look back at the various schools, churches, and institutions with which I’ve worked, I can see this holding true. The leadership is very key in fostering the culture, but often it happens in spite of the leadership, not because of them.

Now to get personal. What do I add to the culture of the the school/church of which I am a part? What do I subtract form the culture? Do I add more than I subtract? Our human nature is to subtract. We want to take from the those around us, but not give. Only Christ can change that for us.

Regardless of the wisdom of their upper management, ants do some very impressive things as a group (check out the Nature Channel). First of all, most ants do not complain and do not lollygag in self pity. I do not know a pious ant, each one is willing to work hard especially for the group cause. The blame game in an ant community is almost unheard of. Ants hold no grudges and are careful not to attack their own kind. Ants are not into big studies, detailed analysis or political correctness to solve obvious problems. Regardless of the size of the devil, ants repeal as a coordinated team.

Ants have different job titles but realize that everyone is important to the organization. Ants are appropriately social, like hanging out
with other ants of good character and often bring other critters home for lunch hoping to convert them.

All ants are aware of their individual responsibility for marketing; when they are in town everyone knows it. Ants, much like us, use food as a conversation starter. Ants are very effective at evangelism and working their cause, for example the average person knows more about ants than Seventh-day Adventists.

Most ants do not swear, drink and drive or have credit card debt. Ants are always trying to add value without adding cost to the organization by volunteering. They have learned that a good reliable volunteer is worth more than a sporadic donor. They spend less time talking and more time doing. Ants are typically running around with a nice grin and have kind encouraging words for each other as they impact a new community. Ants like working together to get the job done especially on big tasks by breaking it up into smaller pieces.

Ant schools are excellent private institutions with most graduating with honors and therefore having good job prospects. All pastoral ants visit campuses on a regular basis to encourage the young to be good by example and personal friendship. These visits make the parents very happy and as a result the grandparents usually donate more money to the school. Teacher ants always smile, are always
personally warm and are great representatives for their campuses by being visible in the community. All ants know that without God, they would not be here.

Lastly, congregational ant leaders are really smart; they make sure that all young are taken care of at any cost or sacrifice because without healthy motivated young there will be no more ants to do God’s work.

Your Brother in Christ
Tom Krazan
Central California