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On February 25th, in Washington, DC, WiredSafety will host the 9th annual Wired Kids Summit. It's a day where the kids are the stars. They present awards to their favorite web sites that entertain, educate, and keep kids safe. They present research they have done as part of their Teenangels and Tweenangels training. They are on stage and the industry leaders, law enforcement, policy makers, and other adults are the audience.

This year we will be launching our Free Stop Cyberbullying tool kit. It is a soup to nuts resource collection to help schools and parents deal with a situation that is growing daily.

Our informal surveys of more than 45,000 students indicate that 85% of them have experienced or been involved in some form of online bullying in the last year. Yet only 5% of them have made their parents aware of it.

I've just put the finishing touches on the professional development portion of the tool kit and there is no way I could have come close to developing this material without Adobe support and software.

The professional development is unique in that it is not add-on curriculum. It is Web 2.0 training with ideas and resources for fighting cyberbullying woven throughout the lessons and activities that will help teachers and students achieve a wide range of national standards.

Rather than simply creating a written manual, Adobe Presenter allowed me to create and include nineteen different multimedia presentations that make the content come alive. But if reading is your thing, Presenter allowed me to include the text of the presentation as searchable notes.

When it came to creating tutorials on making and using blogs, wikis, and other Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, Adobe Captivate 4 allowed me to make ten video tutorials that show teachers the step by step processes.

Needless to say, we used Acrobat to create PDF files throughout the tool kit, and dozens of our WiredSafety videos, animations, and games that are included throughout the product were created with Flash and other Adobe tools.

Finally, I used DreamWeaver to package my material and send it off to be included in the final product that we will announce at the Summit.

This all started seven years ago, as part of a state grant program that funded twenty-one projects to improve reading and writing with technology. I was mentoring in the Atlantic City School District.

The grant required teachers to create a web site to document and disseminate their work. I had been using a program called 3DWriter, which I had developed just for teachers, and was having good success. Then, Marilyn Cohen, the visionary Technology Director of the district asked me to take a look at Macromedia Contribute. After examining it for about 30 minutes, I was sold. The teachers took to it like ducks to water. By the end of the year they had created more content than any of the other twenty grant programs.

The amazing work those teachers did with Contribute, helped me become a Macromedia Education Leader (MEL), and gain the support of a great company and a dynamic group of educators.

A few years later Adobe acquired Macromedia and the MEL’s met the Adobe Master Teachers. The merging of the two groups into the Adobe Education Leader (AEL) family created the most amazing and dynamic group of educators I have ever come across.

The support offered by Adobe and my fellow AEL's has been exhilarating and nothing short of life changing for me. I'm sure it has had the same effect on many of my colleagues and teachers throughout the world.

Thanks, Marilyn, for introducing me to Contribute and thanks, Adobe, for all you do for me and my colleagues around the globe!

WiredSafety.org is in the process of developing a Cyberbullying Toolkit for schools that will contain resources of all types including policy, risk assessment, video, animations, games and classroom lessons.

Most if the material in the tool kit has been developed using Adobe Presenter, Acrobat, Director, and Flash.

Thanks to the generosity and support of Adobe and others, the toolkit will be available FREE to anyone.

I use Moodle as a cyber sandbox for testing. If you would like an advanced peek at a few of the activities that will be in the toolkit, you can visit the sandbox using the following guest login.

Go to http://www.artsskool.com/moodle
Username: toolkit
Password: wiredsafety

There is a feedback forum. Your questions, comments, and suggestions are appreciated.

If you would like to be notified when the toolkit is available, just send an email to art at wiredsafety dot com.

We tell our children not to share personal information online. That’s the right message, but often we are giving it for the wrong reason. Adults often think that sharing personal information is an invitation to predators. While that my have some truth, research shows that predators don’t use that information to track down victims. It also shows that kids who want to avoid predators generally do so and handle online strangers appropriately.

So if we are giving the right message for the wrong reason, what is the right reason? The reason for not sharing too much information is actually something that children can relate to and accept than the stranger danger message. Sharing too much information can lead increases in cyberbullying, trouble with friends, trouble with school officials, trouble with college acceptance, or trouble with future employers, not to mention trouble with the parents of boy friends or girl friends.

For an activity that you can do with your children or conduct with your class visit “Put Your Best Foot Forward”, one of my Adobe Presenter, Cyber Safety through Information Literacy lessons at WiredSafety.

But there is another part to this important message that is often overlooked. Sometimes your best friend forever (BFF) can be your worst enemy. You might be safe and not share personal information, but that’s not enough. You have to make your friends aware for the dangers of sharing and make sure they don’t share any of YOUR personal information.

This Flash animation illustrates my point. It may be a little over the top, but we produced it with our tongue planted firmly in our collective cheeks. You can also download the essence of this blog and the animation in PDF format as a message you can present to teens to help make them Cyber Safe and Information Literate!

Safe Fifer is a multi-agency child safety event, held in Scotland, supported by Fife Constabulary, Fife Fire and Rescue Service and several other agencies and businesses. The event, which attracts several thousand school children from across the Fife area, is intended to drive home safety messages in a variety of important safety areas.

This year, one important consideration was the increasing problem of online child safety, and in particular the dangers of posting information publicly on social networking sites. To help deliver the safety message Fife constabulary enlisted the help of local college students and staff to create an interactive presentation about using social networks.

Colin Maxwell, lecturer at Carnegie College, said "The local police wanted an interactive and engaging way of warning school children about posting information publicly on social networking sites. They wanted a simulation of a social network site that was interactive and could incorporate video. The best choice of software for constructing this was Adobe Flash, as it was easy to make graphics, add video and create interactivity".

Schools and communities Officer, Police Constable Shirley Steele, said "It was great working with the students and their lecturer Colin Maxwell...they were able to provide us with professionally designed software along with input from a younger person's perspective".

The safety message will be extended to high school pupils over the forthcoming months as PC Steele has joined forces with Anne Deas of Fife Education Service to train school teachers to deliver the material.

Part of the presentation consists of a video developed by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which can be seen on Youtube.

So far I've given you two interactive Flash activities to help you begin "the talk" about sexual predators with your children and I promised to give you a preview of a game we are creating to measure a child's vulnerability to the ten ploys used by sexual predators.

The game was created by our partner charity, the Child Safety Research and Innovation Center and is called Sydney Safe-Seeker and the Incredible Journey Home. It's actually suite of products focused on “Street Proofing” the child. The core of the package is the game which was created using Adobe Director, but it includes record keeps, lessons, activity sheets, and other material.

Designed for ages 5-10, it’s a role-playing adventure style game with numerous interactions that lead up to a potentially unsafe situation. Sydney and his friends are sucked through a worm hole and have to find four warp stoned in order to come home. During their journey th4e children are asked to make decisions based on game scenes that were developed to mirror real and sometimes dangerous situations.

As they play the game audio and video feedback help teach them about the wisdom of their decisions. As the same time their actions are being tracked and can later be reported to teachers or parents. Their actions determine which ploys and to what extent children are vulnerable to predators.

The value of this initiative is twofold: first, it teaches young children to incorporate street proofing into their daily lives, giving them an essential skill, which will protect them and the children they play with and second, it provides all of the community stakeholders around the child with the best safety practices to convey to children as well as materials and supplementary resources to help these caregivers and safety professionals convey these messages.

Here are just a few snips from the game.