Digital Smarts Blog

As the new school year starts you may be thinking about what you can do to give your old computer new life, or how to enhance a computer you are handing down to your kids. A recent Tech Tip column in The New York Times covers just that topic and discusses how adding RAM (Random Access Memory) or a new hard drive can revamp an old machine. A simple but useful one-stop shop for Macintosh users looking to upgrade can be found on Other World Computing’s My Upgrades page. There, you can enter the computer’s model number and it will generate a list that shows you all the components of the computer that can be upgraded. You can even buy the parts right there.

According to a 2016 report, there’s been a steep drop in the number of parents who believe that more intimate forms of communication—face-to-face meetings with teachers, for example—are the most effective means to convey important information about students. The study in fact found a growing acceptance of digital methods. Enter simple communication apps like ClassDojo, Spotlight, Remind, and Seesaw that allow teachers to send mobile texts, video summaries, and other alerts to parents about important school activities or their child’s recent academic or behavioral progress.

Taken together, these new ways to communicate are giving parents a deeper look into their childrens' performance and experience in the classroom, while forging tighter relationships between schools and families. Educational apps have even played a vital role in updating parents about snow days and disasters, while advanced features translate report cards into languages from Arabic to Vietnamese. Is your school using one of these apps? What has been your experience?

Did you know that there is a world of emojis beyond what comes on your phone or tablet? Both the Google Play store and the iOS App Store have a selection of emoji-making apps that guide you through creating your own characters. Some, like inTextMoji for iOS, can insert custom characters into messages through their own built-in emoji keyboards, while other apps create small images you can send, like pictures. As with any app, make sure to read its reviews and permissions requests first, as security companies warn that some third party apps allow access to a lot of personal information.

You look at a pair of shoes online and the next thing you know, ads for that pair of shoes show up in a side bar on nearly every website you visit next. Some call them stalker ads and most people agree they can be annoying and maybe even a little bit creepy. How can you get rid of them? Brian Chen covers all sorts of ways to counteract having your online shopping missions stalked in the Tech Fix blog on the New York Times site. He suggests everything from periodically clearing your cookies, to purging your Goggle ad history, to resetting your advertising ID, which is the unique identifier that Android and Apple phones use to help marketers track you. You can reset it whenever you want. On Android devices, you can find the reset button in the ads menu inside the Google settings app, and on iPhones, you can find the reset button inside the settings app in the privacy menu, under advertising.

You may have heard recently that an Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on both Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so.

To their credit, Google is typically up front about asking permission to use your location information. An app like Google Maps will remind you to allow access to location if you use it for navigating. But what if you want to turn it all off? To prohibit tracking activity on your apps and other Goggle services, including location history, check out these step-by-step directions.

As school gets back in session, something that has come up over and over again in research studies is that students who multitask with devices during class (eg: taking lecture notes while scrolling social media) seem to be able to process information in the moment but struggle to retain that information long term. Yet another study, published in the journal Educational Psychology, also reports lower exam performance and the risk of distracting other students.

At the 26^th annual DEFCON convention, the kids hacking division received a great deal of attention when an 11 year-old girl was able to successfully hack into a replica of the Florida Secretary of State’s website. BuzzFeed News reports that it took her only 10 minutes to hack the site and change the results of the 2016 presidential vote. The Secretary of State said changing the website does not represent switching actual votes, but experts say the hack reveals security flaws in the system. This could make an interesting topic of discussion if you have a young “hacker in training” at your house.

Find yourself tripping into autoplay videos on Twitter, Facebook, Goggle Chrome and Safari? Not only does it grab your attention, but the attention of everyone around you as well! While publishers have already figured out that most people mute them, they are working on other ways to grab your attention. In the meantime, learn how to disable autoplay here.

Ever thought about how great everyone looks on Snapchat because of the photo editing capabilities? Now people are translating that to real life. Plastic surgery patients increasingly are requesting procedures to look more like the versions of themselves they see when they use Snapchat filters, according Boston University School of Medicine doctors writing in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery. The doctors describe this phenomenon as a kind of body dysmorphic disorder.

Response has been mixed to a Florida school district's plan to sell ad space in emails that go to students, parents and teachers. The school board approved the program, aimed at raising funds for student travel, but some teachers were not happy to learn that school emails would be used for solicitation purposes. How would you feel if your district instituted such a policy?

While schools shouldn't rely solely on an app to fight cyberbullying and create a positive, supportive culture among their students, the STOPit app is a new tool being used by some districts this fall. A simple design and setup make it easy to get help quickly, especially for cyberbullying issues. On the app, students can anonymously report any bullying, self-harm, or violence concerns. A school administrator on the receiving end can then respond to address the issue. As some administrators point out, kids are often more comfortable reporting issues using technology rather than face-to-face.

Getting parental input in creating a social media policy will allow schools to support the proper use of social networks and guard against potential privacy violations, writes Common Sense Media's Jeff Knutson in a commentary in T.H.E. Journal. Knutson outlines important things to include when drafting such a policy, such as parent opt-out forms and establishing teacher and student guidelines for protecting and respecting student privacy.

Facebook’s “Memories” feature is a cute way to reminisce on fun times and take a look back at how your children have grown over the years, but what about those posts (or people) you don’t want to remember?

To filter out someone you don’t wish to see in these nostalgia posts, point your browser to facebook.com/memories. When you land on the page, click the Preferences button. In the box that appears, click the Edit button next to People and enter the names you wish to filter out. You can also filter out events on certain dates.

Some schools are going to be testing out facial recognition software this next school year as a school security measure. Privacy experts have complained that the software does not do a good job especially with the faces of teen girls and minorities. Apparently it can also have trouble with other more familiar faces as well.  In a test of Amazon’s facial recognition software, the American Civil Liberties Union ran photos of members of Congress against a database of 25,000 mugshots. The software concluded that 28 of the lawmakers were criminals, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Amazon said the software, which is being tested by police departments, was a tool and not a final authority. Just good to know if your school tries out this technology this fall.

Ask any kid while they are using their cell phone if they are listening to you, chances are they will reply in the affirmative even though they will have trouble recounting what has been said. That’s what Arnold Glass, a psychology professor at Rutgers University at New Brunswick thought, but his students told him that using various digital devices in his class had no negative effect on their performance, so he decided to test it out. His study shows that digital multitasking can adversely affect students' long-term retention of material, a study you might want to tell your kids about.

Education technology expert Douglas Levin recently revealed findings that are not sitting well with privacy advocates. A recent NY Times article cites Levin’s study in stating that most public  while you are on it you are likely being tracked. All but one public-school website out of 159 examined by Levin were found to have some type of ad tracking or online surveillance technology embedded in them (placed there by the company who sold the software to the school), meaning that based on what you look at, that information may be sold to outside third parties who will then push ads and other information your way. While this kind of tracking is considered fair game by some, others have raised concerns about data privacy including the fact that children may be being tracked illegally while on a school’s website retrieving information about mundane things such as a homework assignment.

It has been a while since Google Glasses have been in the news. While they never quite made out to become the newest social trend, they are helping some children with autism better understand facial expressions, according to findings published in npj Digital Medicine. Children use a smartphone app that works with the Google Glass headset and it gives the wearer information on what emotions other people are expressing. Researchers say the social skills of study participants improved after about 10 weeks of treatment.

Here is one sure to get a conversation started with your kids. Students at a private school in France are being asked to wear Bluetooth-enabled tracking devices that will allow teachers to instantly take attendance and find students if they are not in class. Students who do not wear the device or forget it at home could be subject to a fine.

The Associated Press is reporting that some companies are offering US schools free facial-recognition software that is also used on city streets and among government agencies and businesses. At odds with this move, digital-rights advocacy groups are expressing concerns about the software's effects on privacy, and the New York Civil Liberties Union has asked the state's education officials to prevent schools' implementation of the software. Others question the technology’s cost and effectiveness, given reports like one released in February by MIT and Stanford University that found some facial recognition programs don’t work well in correctly identifying people who belong to racial minorities or women.

A recent email hack includes information including an old password you might have once, making you believe they have information on you. These sorts of online extortion schemes — which try to guilt people into paying off hackers claiming to have compromising information — are nothing new. As for the inclusion of a real password, after years of database breaches from major sites and services like Yahoo, eBay, Sony PlayStation and dozens of other companies, varying amounts of people’s data are floating around the internet, often for sale on the black market. That data is now being integrated into traditional phishing scams.

According to the Krebs on Security blog, several recipients of this particular blackmail campaign observed that the password included in the message was old, some by about a decade, and not currently in use. For those who haven’t changed their passwords in years, the ruse could appear more realistic, and the hustle itself may become fine-tuned as the perpetrators weave in fresher bits of stolen user data.  Important to keep in mind for yourself, but also for discussing with your children who may fall prey to these schemes as well. Remembering to update your passwords frequently is a good security practice. You can also report phishing incidents on the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center site.