Tagging/Grafitti update... From Sierra Sun

The head custodian of North Tahoe High and Middle School got a surprise Friday morning when he arrived at work and found the new Tahoe City school vandalized.The Placer County Sheriff’s Office and school administrators are investigating the graffiti that covered doors, windows and walls around the campus in green spray paint. Between the school’s surveillance cameras and student input, authorities are verifying and investigating possible leads.
On Friday afternoon Deputy Russ Potts, the school resource officer, said there were suspects and that deputies were looking for a specific vehicle.“I’m reasonably sure it’s no current students at our high school,” Potts said. “We have some information we need to complete before we [make an arrest].”

He said that the North Tahoe community in general has a problem with “tagging” and the “whole gang mentality.” Whether it’s “KB Stoners,” “Crips,” “Bloods,” or “XIV,” graffiti is now seen along the North Shore, Potts said.“[Tagging] comes and goes. There are times where it’s worse and times where it’s not,” he said.

The weekend marked homecoming at North Tahoe High, and students showed their true colors by helping to clean the vandalized windows and doors. Parents also called to offer their services. The graffiti was nearly all removed, but the building will likely need re-painting, said Potts.“Students were very upset by what they saw. They take tremendous pride in this entire building,” said Bill Frey, North Tahoe High principal. “They came around very quickly and offered help scrubbing on windows.”

NTHS Get's Tagged with Grafitti Last Night

Not good news, but it did happen last night…
We’ll see if the surveillance cameras catch them…

For me, I feel personally violated. Other parents say this has broken their hearts.
We excitedly watched this new school being built for over a year and then this. It has become a symbol of pride for us…
Open house last Tuesday night was awesome! It felt like 100 % of the parents came.

And with our heads reeling from the Platte Canyon High School incident, I cannot believe how low or stupid people can get..

These vandals are sick people...we'll work until we find them...

MySpace.com: Bringing out the Best and Worst of the Internet

We all know that Myspace is the most famous (or infamous) of all the so-called social networking web sites, but what do you really know about them other than that fact that your children have MySpace sites?

MySpace is a social networking Web site. (It gained so much popularity that Fox Interactive Media bought the site for $580 million last summer.) MySpace and social networking sites like it offer thriving communities where young people post their personal profiles including email addresses, links to personal web sites and cell phone numbers. They can also engage in countless hours of chatting, photo and file sharing. For professionals, MySpace offers a great opportunity market their trades and services.

How it works: You join up for free, then create your profile, or “Space”. Your space will typically include your personal or business “bio”, plus one or more photos of yourself. As friends are invited to visit your space, the “social networking” begins. The network builds as more and more friends join up to your space. People you don’t even know will discover your space, find it intriguing, and ask to be invited. Real time communication enhances the social networking aspect, and you and the friends begin chatting via Instant Messaging.

Sounds fairly harmless at the first look, however when you dig into the trenches of social networking Web sites, you’ll find The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The Good:
As mentioned above, MySpace is a good tool for marketing your talents. Musicians can be very successful utilizing MySpace by sharing their music to the world.

The Bad:
One of the unforeseen (uncontrolled and unmonitored) aspects of MySpace is that one of your so called “friends” may email you and direct you to what you think is their personal web site. In some cases this is true, but in other instances, you will be directed to porn sites, and various Spyware programs will automatically load onto your computer. So now your computer is hacked, and it costs money to fix these hacks. MySpace provides a very rich “marketing” environment for devious industries to “harvest” potential consumers and fool them into clicking to their websites.

The Ugly:
In my opinion, this is the worst case scenario. MySpace and other social sites also have become hangouts for child predators, child pornographers, and other lowlifes.
“Lurkers” find your site, ask to be invited as a friend of your space, then once the communication channel is open, they’ll use various psychological and emotional tactics to lure their prey.
I do not advocate the use of MySpace.com. The fact is MySpace is a reality; there are 80 million users of MySpace, and that offers huge opportunities for those who are opportunistic, good, bad, and ugly. Be vigilant!

North Tahoe High School has way too many web sites?

NTHS has way too many web sites. Did you even know there were any? Well there are...quite a few actually. I'll list a few at the end of this post. The larger issue is why are there so many? And why do they all have a completely different look and feel?

My thinking is that TTUSD does not have a clear direction as to what makes a well thought out, coshesive web portal that shows continuity across all schools in our district. Is there a plan? I have no idea.

But I do know this. Teachers and coaches do want web presence for their class calendars, athletic events, etc. They realize parents want and need to know what is going on! But there is no dirction as how to proceed in getting this information out. So they find any web site that is committed to letting teachers and coaches get their information out! Not bad, it's great there is som much motivation. It gets the information out there, if you know where to look, that is...

Take for instance the ntschools.info site I created a year ago. I built that because the link from the ttusd.org site went to nowhere land...broken links, dead links, old data (years old).

So the momentum swing for all the disparate sites was due to the need to publish information but no district web site to do so. And most teachers did not know of ntschools.info, I come to find out.

My committment to posting info at ntschools has changed focus at bit....it now is intended to be a portal for all the disparate web sites that teachers and coaches are using to post information.. check it out.