Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wes Fryer

Category: isafety

  • Recent Virtual Workshops by Wes (March – April 2020)

    The move to “remote learning” at our school in late-March 2020 has corresponded with an uptick in the number of online workshops and webinars I’ve offered for teachers, mainly for faculty at our school as part of my “day job,” but also a few evening and weekend virtual presentations. All of the workshops I’ve led…

  • Protecting Yourself and Your Family Online (March 2020)

    This past Thursday evening, on March 26, 2020, I shared a free online webinar titled, “Protecting Yourself and Your Family Online.” A recorded video of this 63 minute presentation is available on YouTube, and linked from the VIDEOS page of DesignCreateShare.com. The webinar description was: As we live more of our lives online via Internet-powered…

  • Thoughts on Content Filtering, Parent Education, and School Laptop Initiatives

    The Oklahoman, our largest Oklahoma City based newspaper by circulation, published a scathing article today about Norman Public Schools’ new MacBook Air and iPad “1 to 1 Learning” initiative. The article is titled, “‘They want them gone’: Norman parents complain of school devices.” In case The Oklahoman puts this article behind their paywall as they…

  • Don’t Get Tricked Online – A Media Literacy Lesson

    Our fall trimester ends next week, and I have loved the opportunity this school year to return to the “regular classroom” and teach our 5th and 6th graders a variety of digital and media literacy skills, as well work with teachers across all our PK-12 grade levels as a pedagogic / learning coach. In this…

  • Safety Tip When Paying with Plastic

    Whenever you eat out at a restaurant or are using a plastic debit or credit card to pay for something, NEVER let the physical card out of your sight. Never let a server or business employee take your debit or credit card to another location out of your view, whether it’s the front of the…

  • Google Mesh Home WiFi Makes our Internet Access MUCH faster

    This is a review of the “Google WiFi system, 3-Pack – Router replacement for whole home coverage” (NLS-1304-25) product which I posted to Amazon today. “Google Mesh WiFi” (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer I have been wanting to purchase a mesh Wi-Fi system at home for many months, and finally pulled the trigger last month. Wow what…

  • Advice for Responding to and Protecting Against Phishing Email Attacks

    This month we have seen an uptick in phishing attacks against our faculty and staff at school. Here is a copy of some suggestions for responding to and protecting against email phishing attacks which I shared this evening via email with our team. General guidelines for responding to email phishing attacks are: If you are…

  • Schools Blocking YouTube and Digital Citizenship

    Content filtering in schools has always been contentious since students and teachers first gained access to the World Wide Web and the Internet in the 1990s. Today in 2019, however, many people might be surprised that “draconian content filtering policies” (at least in the opinion of this author) are still in place in some schools.…

  • Adult Identity and the “I Can’t Use Technology Well” Introduction

    Last Friday evening before turning in for the night, I shared a six part, threaded series of thoughts on Twitter based on frequent conversations I have with technology-fearful adults. Before reflecting a bit more on these ideas, as well as sharing some of the responses these tweets invited from others, I’ll share this series of…

  • Friends Don’t Let Friends Use the Edge Web Browser (or Bing for Search)

    This past week at school, I accidentally clicked a bad link while setting up a fresh installation of Windows10. This dramatically highlighted how easy it is for someone today to accidentally install malware or adware on a computer, and why friends shouldn’t let friends use the Edge Web Browser or the Bing search engine by Microsoft.…