Help Make Kids Safer Online
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My 14-year-old told me a friend is texting naked pictures to a classmate.
A middle-schooler in my town ended in the hospital with an eating disorder because she friended someone online that she didn't know. And that "person" turned out to really be a toxic group of girls who convinced her she was too fat.
Kids today are online. For many it starts from the moment pictures of their birth hit Facebook. And they're not ready. Schools just don't have the resources they need to teach the skills and real security knowledge needed today.
Kids today are being eaten by technology.
By now everyone has seen a teen so absorbed in texting and tweeting and posting status updates with their online friends that they ignore the world going on around them.
More and more schools are requiring kids to be online for regular school work. So they need to be. And their friends are there too. As well as the research they need to do homework.
With some great irony, society wants us to equip children with technology to better educate them, but doesn't seem to want them to know enough to protect themselves from the technology.
As a parent, even if you want to help, can you?
So in 2003 we started Hacker Highschool, a project to encourage teens to learn how to take control of their technology, and in doing so, to keep themselves from being consumed by it.
Why HACKER? Because we need to appeal to teens! We need to reach teens who are being used by technology AND those who are already starting to look at how to hack so we can address it.
Any high school teacher will tell you that you need to attract teens emotionally so they even start and then we appeal to their curiosity and sense of adventure to keep them learning. Read more about the use of hacking to open up education in this award-winning article .
We show kids how to defend themselves through self-learning stories and exercises. No additional expert or teacher needed.
We have made 12, free, open-source lesson books written exclusively for the teen brain that teaches young people to be safe online. How? We show them how to understand and explore technology with curiosity, creativity, resourcefulness, and empathy.
Why should you help? Today's teens are tomorrows working, voting, contributing adults. Help us and we can make sure those kids only benefit from technology. And that will make better adults and better, SAFER communities.
This year we made a school textbook that parents and teachers could get at a fair price. But it's not enough. As an open source project we need new funds to take advantage of a big opportunity coming up April 2015.
We have been given a kiosk with a 40 inch video
monitor, a sign with our logo, and media attention at the largest cybersecurity conference in America: the RSA Conference in San Francisco, to be part of their Cyber Security for Kids exhibition. That would get our project in front of tens of thousands of potential volunteers, cyber-educators, parents, and most of all, smart, qualified cyber-security professionals who can take Hacker Highschool to local schools and help out. But we need funds to be able to make this work:
+ Travel expenses for four project developers who are volunteering their time to work at the kiosk and introduce the project in the exhibit hall.
+ An instructional video for the kiosk
+ Additional infosheets, hand-outs, printed book and lesson samples,
+ Shirts for our team with our logo to show unity.
+ We have 14 more lesson books in the works that we want to continue developing!
Now this is a chance for you to join us in being part of something very big, the future.
If you want to see how much we've done, come visit us and check out the lessons at www.hackerhighschool.org
Then afterwards, please come back here and give us your support to bring Hacker Highschool to more schools and more teens everywhere. The future needs adults who can take control of the technology around them before it takes control of them.
We will give recognition on the Hacker Highschool website and at the expo to everybody who helps us get to RSA!
Thank you!!
A middle-schooler in my town ended in the hospital with an eating disorder because she friended someone online that she didn't know. And that "person" turned out to really be a toxic group of girls who convinced her she was too fat.
Kids today are online. For many it starts from the moment pictures of their birth hit Facebook. And they're not ready. Schools just don't have the resources they need to teach the skills and real security knowledge needed today.
Kids today are being eaten by technology.
By now everyone has seen a teen so absorbed in texting and tweeting and posting status updates with their online friends that they ignore the world going on around them.
More and more schools are requiring kids to be online for regular school work. So they need to be. And their friends are there too. As well as the research they need to do homework.
With some great irony, society wants us to equip children with technology to better educate them, but doesn't seem to want them to know enough to protect themselves from the technology.
As a parent, even if you want to help, can you?
So in 2003 we started Hacker Highschool, a project to encourage teens to learn how to take control of their technology, and in doing so, to keep themselves from being consumed by it.
Why HACKER? Because we need to appeal to teens! We need to reach teens who are being used by technology AND those who are already starting to look at how to hack so we can address it.
Any high school teacher will tell you that you need to attract teens emotionally so they even start and then we appeal to their curiosity and sense of adventure to keep them learning. Read more about the use of hacking to open up education in this award-winning article .
We show kids how to defend themselves through self-learning stories and exercises. No additional expert or teacher needed.
We have made 12, free, open-source lesson books written exclusively for the teen brain that teaches young people to be safe online. How? We show them how to understand and explore technology with curiosity, creativity, resourcefulness, and empathy.
Why should you help? Today's teens are tomorrows working, voting, contributing adults. Help us and we can make sure those kids only benefit from technology. And that will make better adults and better, SAFER communities.
This year we made a school textbook that parents and teachers could get at a fair price. But it's not enough. As an open source project we need new funds to take advantage of a big opportunity coming up April 2015.
We have been given a kiosk with a 40 inch video
monitor, a sign with our logo, and media attention at the largest cybersecurity conference in America: the RSA Conference in San Francisco, to be part of their Cyber Security for Kids exhibition. That would get our project in front of tens of thousands of potential volunteers, cyber-educators, parents, and most of all, smart, qualified cyber-security professionals who can take Hacker Highschool to local schools and help out. But we need funds to be able to make this work:
+ Travel expenses for four project developers who are volunteering their time to work at the kiosk and introduce the project in the exhibit hall.
+ An instructional video for the kiosk
+ Additional infosheets, hand-outs, printed book and lesson samples,
+ Shirts for our team with our logo to show unity.
+ We have 14 more lesson books in the works that we want to continue developing!
Now this is a chance for you to join us in being part of something very big, the future.
If you want to see how much we've done, come visit us and check out the lessons at www.hackerhighschool.org
Then afterwards, please come back here and give us your support to bring Hacker Highschool to more schools and more teens everywhere. The future needs adults who can take control of the technology around them before it takes control of them.
We will give recognition on the Hacker Highschool website and at the expo to everybody who helps us get to RSA!
Thank you!!
Organizer
Pete Herzog
Organizer
Lake George, NY
