Friday, October 25, 2013
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Overnight Field Trip Fundraiser
1. Turn in your order form by October 29, 2013 to your homeroom teacher
* Order
forms will not be accepted after the 29th
2. Products will be here on November 21, 2013! You if you sell/order cookie dough, please make
arrangements to pick up these items on this date.
Click here for the parent/student letter with more information.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Middle School Dance - Masquerade Costume Ball
All middle school students are invited to the annual MS Halloween Dance. The theme of this year's dance is Masquerade Costume Ball, Where your Dreams and Nightmares Collide. The dance will be held in the lower building on October 23 from 6:45-8:45pm. Tickets sells ended on October 21st. However, tickets can be purchased at the door for $10.00 per person.
Students may be dropped off for the dance beginning at 6:45pm under the red awning of the lower building next to the playground. Pick up for the dance will begin promptly at 8:45pm. Pick up will be under the red canopy on the south side of the lower building. Pick up line will follow lower building car rider procedures. Cars will only be allowed to exit out the back entrance of the lower building and turn right on to Hwy 16. No cars will be allowed to drive around the backside of the lower building. We would greatly appreciate students trying to carpool to avoid cars backing up Hwy 16.
If you have any questions, please let me know!!
Sincerely,
Mrs. Williams
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Instagram: Photo and Video Posting Dangers for Young People
Introduction
Teens and tweens frequently post photos online using their cell phones. One of the most popular mobile applications (apps) for photo sharing is called Instagram. This free, online photo sharing and social network application was launched in 2010 and was acquired by Facebook in 2012.
Instagram allows members to digitally edit, upload and share photos and short videos with other members through the Instagram website, email, and other social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumbler, and Flickr—all with a single click.
Instagram Dangers
Instagram states in its Terms of Use that is not for children under the age of 13. However, the age requirement can be spoofed easily by a tenacious young person falsely posting an incorrect birth year when creating an account or even later producing a fraudulent ID when confronted for proof of age by the Instagram website.
The biggest danger for young people is that the photos and videos that they are posting on Instagram are accessible to countless unintended viewers as the Instagram member accounts are automatically defaulted to the “public” viewing setting, which means the images can be viewed by anyone in the world. To modify the public viewing feature, one must manually make changes to the Instagram default privacy settings.
Once one’s profile has been personalized to more private settings, anyone who wants to see the photos will need to be the user’s friend or be on Instagram’s approved “follower” first. To be approved, one must send the user a request and the user must approve the request.
Images that young people upload to Instagram not only default to a public viewing setting but are also “geotagged” by default. Geotagging is the process of adding geographical metadata to photos or videos. This metadata usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates. With this imbedded data, child molesters, who are most often on the cutting edge of technology, can copy photos and can also generate Google map locations of where a young person spends most of his or her time.
Instagram recently launched “photo tagging,” which is one of the powerful social networking features that fueled Facebook’s early growth. This feature allows a user to “tag” or highlight any person in a photo, which then automatically appears in the “Photos Of You” section of one’s profile. Unfortunately, even if one is proactive and changes a young person’s Instagram settings to “private” and disables the geo-location feature, there are still dangers. For example, if a young person’s friends have not changed their profile default settings, the photos they upload and have tagged still have the same danger of a non-approved friend viewing them or mapping and tracking a young person’s activities.
One should also be aware that when a young person upgrades his or her phone’s operating system software, the settings that one previously set for privacy with the geo-location disabled will automatically revert back to the default public viewing and geo-location enabled.
Additionally, on December 17, 2012, Instagram updated its Terms of Service, granting itself the right to sell users’ photos to third parties without notification or compensation starting on January 16, 2013. An outpouring of criticism from privacy advocates prompted Instagram to issue a statement retracting the controversial terms. The issue caused Instagram to lose a portion of its user-base as former users switched to other photo sharing applications such as Flickr or Snapfish. Even though Instagram retracted the policy, the dangers of posting on Instagram or other social media sites were emphasized by the incident.
Conclusion
As technology continues to change rapidly, all of us charged with protecting children must continue our efforts to stay abreast of the many new programs and applications that may be used by child abusers to manipulate and exploit children.
Friday, October 4, 2013
Overnight Field Trip Fundraiser - Great American Opportunities
We are excited about this year’s
field trip fundraiser! All the materials
for your child to participate and raise money for his/her own field trip account will be in a packet that will be
distributed (Friday, October 11th).
This is a voluntary fundraiser. Students are not required to participate
but highly encouraged! In the past,
motivated students have raised their entire field trip cost through
fundraisers. For every sale, your child
will receive a certain percentage to apply to their overnight field trip. We are partnering with great
company-Great American Opportunities -for this successful event. Click here to visit their website. More information to come!!
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Dear LCS 8th
grade Students, Parents, and Guardians,
We have an exciting trip planned for the 8th grade overnight field trip this year. The class will be heading to Washington, D.C April 14-16, 2014 (Monday - Wednesday). We will leave Monday morning (early!) from LCS and return to school Wednesday evening (late evening). This trip is an awesome educational opportunity and tons of fun for everyone! Please click here for more information!!
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