Articles for Educators at DCISD
-
TRICKY SCAM PLANTS PHISHING LINKS IN YOUR GOOGLE CALENDAR
You know the drill: If you have any doubts, don't click links or download attachments. Now, thanks to new findings from the threat intelligence firm Kaspersky, along with phishing texts, phishing tweets, and phishing pop-ups, you need to worry about one more thing: phishing in your calendar.
-
500 Creative Writing Prompts
You have to write for a minimum amount of time or minimum words without stopping for more than a few seconds or all of your work is lost. If you do reach the minimum (you choose what the minimum is), you can download your writing as a Word doc to continue the writing and editing process.
-
Teaching With Historical Newspapers - An LOC Webinar Recording
There are two sites that often refer people to when I'm asked about locating copies of old newspapers. The first is the Google Newspaper Archive. The second is the Chronicling America collection from the Library of Congress.
-
Try Mentimeter for Classroom Quiz Games
Mentimeter lets you create slides that then become the basis of your quiz game. You can have multiple choice and open-response quiz questions in your slides. The responses to each question can be displayed in a variety of ways including bar graphs, word clouds, and heat maps.
-
Three Lessons to Learn from the $9.2M Copyright Ruling Against Houston ISD
The short version of the case is that teachers in the district were photocopying and redistributing copyrighted study guides without permission of DynaStudy and continued to do so even after DynaStudy raised concerns to the school district. According to World IP Review's article, the district tried to make a Fair Use claim regarding use of four of the copyrighted works, but the court ruled against the claims.
-
Emoji Scavenger Hunt
Do your students like Scavenger Hunts? What about emojis? If your answers are yes to these questions and if your students can bring/use their phones or tablets to school, Emoji Scavenger Hunt is a fun AI- powered experiment that you can play on your phones or your iPads in the classrooms.
-
Legal Threats Make Powerful Phishing Lures
Some of the most convincing email phishing and malware attacks come disguised as nastygrams from a law firm. Such scams typically notify the recipient that he/she is being sued, and instruct them to review the attached file and respond within a few days — or else. On or around May 12, at least two antivirus firms began detecting booby-trapped Microsoft Word files that were sent along with some variants of the message.
-
An Excellent Web Tool to Create Jeopardy-Like Games
JeopardyLabs is an excellent web tool that allows you to easily create Jeopardy-like games without the need for PowerPoint. The process to design a customized Jeopardy template is simple and easy and does not require registration.
-
Nine Tutorials for Making Your Own Mobile App
Glide is a service that anyone can use to create a mobile app without doing any coding. Glide lets you take one of your Google Sheets and have the information become a mobile app.
-
ReadWorks Offers Free Summer Reading Packets
Summer will be here soon (in the northern hemisphere) and ReadWorks has free summer reading packets that you can send home with your students.
-
Explained: like-farming
The difference between legitimate like-farmers and scammers? Scammers will often transform those popular posts into completely different sites that trick users into giving away their personal information, forking over money or credit card details, or clearing out their crypto wallets.
-
Kahoot! Introduces Smart Practice for Challenge Feature
With the new Smart practice, learners can re visit previous kahoots or challenges where they answered some questions incorrectly. They will be prompted to start it when a game is completed.
-
Boclips Launches Curated, Secure Video Platform for Educators
Boclips for Teachers allows teachers to simply cut and paste links, supplementing lessons in any school subject with short video clips that capture and keep students’ attention.
-
Facilitating Inquiry in the Classroom, Part 3: Questions, Process, Metacognition, and 15 Pre-Search
By understanding the need for pre-search and inquiry one can see how these tools, some of which you may already know, can be used in a different way to help students as they get ready to research.
-
Baseball, Earth Day and STEM Teaching Resources for April
April is National Poetry Month, but it also brings Earth Day and to celebrate we make sure our students understand the concept of an Eco footprint through the use of Digital Footprint activities.
-
Free Digital Library Provides Millions of Primary Sources for U.S. History
The layers of rich documents, images, and videos are carefully organized and curated, and can be accessed through topical browsing, searching and filtering, or in pre-made exhibition collections and primary source sets.
-
Biblionasium Social Reading Site Earns Top Ratings From Educators
It's clean, colorful, and really appealing to young readers; all instruction is written in kid-friendly language.
-
Say hello to Baldr, a new stealer on the market
Typically, it is quite apparent when a malware is thrown together for a quick buck vs. when it is skillfully crafted for a long-running campaign. Baldr sits firmly in the latter category—it is not the work of a script kiddie. It’s clear Baldr’s authors spent a lot of time developing this particular threat.
-
Increase Screen Time to Increase Literacy Proficiency
One of the worst things a parent or teacher can do is to associate reading with anxiety and failure. One way to avoid this is to make reading fun with as many scaffolds as possible.
-
Google Chrome zero-day: Now is the time to update and restart your browser
There are several good reasons why you need to take this new Chrome zero-day seriously. For starters, we are talking about a full exploitation that escapes the sandbox and leads to remote code execution.
-
9 Top YouTube Channels to Boost Classroom Lessons
Classroom-worthy videos on YouTube shouldn't be replacements for your lessons; they should be additions to the awesome lessons you already teach. Whether they're an intriguing hook or the spark for a thought-provoking reflection, the best videos for school bring the world and all of its wonder into our classrooms.
-
Sophisticated phishing: a roundup of noteworthy campaigns
To understand why phishing attacks continue to work, we look to cutting-edge tactics devised by threat actors to obfuscate their true intentions and capitalize on basic negligence. To that end, we’ve put together a roundup of noteworthy, out-of-the-box phishing campaigns of the last year.
-
The Kid Should See This
The Kid Should See This connects busy teachers and parents to a growing library of smart, short, & super-cool, “not-made-for-kids, but perfect for them” videos that can be watched in the classroom or together at home. Enjoy 8-12 new vids each week, and search 4,000+ videos in the archives.
-
From Consumers to Producers: Helping Kids Make Screen Time Meaningful
The skills that you develop as a content creator are applicable across a wide range of disciplines and creating content helps kids develop valuable skills and a growth mindset that will likely help them be successful in other areas away from the screen.
-
Sextortion Bitcoin scam makes unwelcome return
The scam involves making use of old breach dumps, then emailing someone from the list and reminding them of their old password. When something lands in your mailbox with “Hey, remember this?” it’s a surefire way to focus the reader’s attention.
-
BrainPOP Jr. in 30 Seconds
BrainPOP Jr. is one of the most popular providers of learning resources for young kids. But does it live up to the hype?
-
This online quiz is now confirmed to be a phishing scam
Katz has confirmed what many of us have already long suspected: those short quizzes shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are scams. And behind them are sophisticated and coordinated efforts that were designed for prolonged user exposure to fraud campaigns.
-
Class Tech Tips: 25 Reasons to Use TED-Ed in Your Classroom
If you’ve ever watched a TED talk before you’re familiar with the power of those short videos, focused on a single idea. Well the folks at TED also have a platform for students and teachers. It’s called TED-Ed, and you’ll find lots of short videos, resources and discussion questions for your classroom.
-
Something else is phishy: How to detect phishing attempts on mobile
Surprisingly, phishers seem to have tipped the scales to a new preferred target: iPhone users. Wandera, a mobile security solutions provider, has observed that iOS users experience twice as many phishing attacks compared to their Android counterparts.
-
Half of all Phishing Sites Now Have the Padlock
Maybe you were once advised to “look for the padlock” as a means of telling legitimate e-commerce sites from phishing or malware traps. New research indicates that half of all phishing scams are now hosted on Web sites whose Internet address includes the padlock and begins with “https://”.
-
Open Education Resources for Teachers and Students
Open Education Resources (OER) Commons is a platform that provides open access to a wide variety of open educational resources that are either in the public domain or are licensed under Creative Commons.
-
SMS Phishing + Cardless ATM = Profit
Thieves are combining SMS-based phishing attacks with new “cardless” ATMs to rapidly convert phished bank account credentials into cash. Recent arrests in Ohio shed light on how this scam works.
-
7 Good Flashcard Creation Apps for Teachers
Some of these apps even allow students to share their flashcards with others, listen to their material being read in several languages, include pictures and sounds in their cards and many more.
-
10 Top Museums You Can Explore Right Here, Right Now
Get inspiration for which museums and galleries to visit this weekend and warm up for some culture by taking a virtual tour of these top museums around the world.
-
A Great Resource of Free Stock Photos to Use with Students in Class
Photos in Pexels are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) which allows you to re-use them for personal as well as comercial purposes and usually without the need for attribution.
-
Six Tips to Stop Phisherman
Brian Kernighan once said, “If you don’t understand viruses, phishing, and similar cyber threats, you become more susceptible to them.” With cyber scams constantly increasing in sophistication, this statement is especially true today.
-
TED Ed Talks for Language Teachers
These are educational talks that tackle a wide variety of interesting topics related to language from contentious issues in language philosophy to the syntactic and semantic mechanics of language learning.
-
Teachers Detailed Guide to Chromebooks
For those of you using Chromebooks in their instruction, the chart below is a great resource to keep handy. The chart is based on insights collected from Chromebook Help.
-
3 Good Lesson Planners for Teachers
After posting about lesson plan resources for teachers, we received a request from one of our readers asking about lesson planners, so we decided to share with you our favourite free tools for planning lessons.
-
Five easy ways to recognize and dispose of malicious emails
The unsolicited commercial spam email is generally easy to recognize, report, and discard, but what about more dangerous types of spam? How can you determine if an email contains a malicious link or attachment, or is trying to scam you out of money or your personal information?
-
4 Important Videos to Help Students Use The Internet Smartly
In today’s post we are sharing with you four oldie but goodie YouTube videos to help you teach your students how to navigate the web smartly. As good digital citizens, students need to be educated on the fundamentals behind a responsible and effective use of the Internet.
-
Don’t Give Away Historic Details About Yourself
Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as “What was your first job,” or “What was your first car?” The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away the answers to “secret questions” that can be used to unlock access to a host of your online identities and accounts.
-
File Your Taxes Before Scammers Do It For You
Today, Jan. 29, is officially the first day of the 2018 tax-filing season, also known as the day fraudsters start requesting phony tax refunds in the names of identity theft victims. Want to minimize the chances of getting hit by tax refund fraud this year? File your taxes before the bad guys can!
-
Free Virtual Manipulatives for Math Teachers
The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives is a digital library that provides K-12 teachers and students with a wide variety of math activities and virtual manipulatives. You can find manipulatives for all grade levels. Top axis of the chart features grades from Pre-K-2 to grades 9-12. Click on the grade level you are interested in to view and access its resources.
-
Parents’ Ultimate Guide to Cybersecurity
Navigating the dangers of cybersecurity and the internet means being honest with your kids about what is at stake. Identities can be stolen, credit ratings can be destroyed, and bullies can do serious harm. Educating your kids about cybersecurity is one of the most effective things you can do to keep them safe while online.
-
Facebook phishers want you to “Connect with Facebook”
HTTPS is becoming increasingly popular with scammers as it adds an extra air of authenticity to the whole operation. As a result, you can’t just assume a “secure” site is also a safe one. There could well be a phisher lurking in the distance.
-
MacOS High Sierra Users: Change Root Password Now
A newly-discovered flaw in macOS High Sierra — Apple’s latest iteration of its operating system — allows anyone with local (and, apparently in some cases, remote) access to the machine to log in as the all-powerful “root” user without supplying a password. Fortunately, there is a simple fix for this until Apple patches this inexplicable bug: Change the root account’s password now.
-
2017 RiskIQ Black Friday e-Commerce Blacklist: 1 in 25 Apps Fake
Last year, consumers spent $9.36 billion online over the four-day Black Friday weekend, of which $1.2 billion was driven by mobile shopping. Meanwhile, thousand of apps, blacklisted for being dangerous, are hosted by app stores around the world, even the Apple App Store and Google Play. These apps use the branding of well-known retailers to attempt to fool users into entering credit card information, which opens them up to potential financial fraud.
-
Free Resources to Teach Kids the Fundamentals of Digital Citizenship
-
9 Websites to Help Kids with Their Homework
-
Something’s phishy: How to detect phishing attempts
If only phishing attempts were that obvious.
-
Tons of Free Video Math Tutorials for Students
Patrick makes it super easy for anyone to learn math through a collection of useful video lessons. Patrick has been teaching math for 8 years at the university level.
-
Too smart to fall for a spear-phishing message? Think again
Researchers believe that under the right conditions anyone can be fooled by a spear-phishing message. Find out how they came to that conclusion.
-
Tackling the myths surrounding cyberbullying
Cyberbullying is an act most of us are familiar with. Knowing what it is, who’re involved, and its harmful effects to targets are easy enough to identify; but do you know that cyberbullying is surrounded by misconceptions, too?
-
How to Spring Clean Your Digital Clutter to Protect Yourself
YOU’RE USING STRONG and unique passwords. You’re on the lookout for phishing emails. And you’ve set up two-factor authentication on every account that offers it.
