“Track and Treat” pilots safe Halloween

One hundred families in Atlanta are participating in a cellular safety pilot project this Halloween. The idea is for GPS-enable phones to make it possible for parents to keep track on a map of exactly where their children are as they are out in soliciting treats. Roberta Rovetta, senior director of product management for QUALCOMM CDMA Technologies, the pilot program’s sponsor, said:

“Halloween is a great time for moms and kids to have GPS on their cell phones because trick-or-treating is the first time many kids venture out without adult supervision.”

More details of projects to use mobile phones for Halloween safety are described in the Marketing Daily article quoted above. In addition to the GPS pilot, there are these wireless approaches:

. . . Atlanta-based Cingular Wireless is providing tips for parents that can help them more effectively communicate with their kids via wireless messaging. The company issued a series of sample text messages parents could send to their kids while they are out trick-or-treating, such as, “Save ur candy till I chk it!” and encouraged kids and parents to use the picture/video messaging capabilities on their phones to keep in touch.

Cingular also sponsored a survey of parents indicating that 63 percent of the 1,175 parents surveyed said that text messaging has improved their communication with their kids.

Halloween Safety Tips

As I began looking around for useful material to blog something here about Halloween safety, I found that the Internet has lots of information. The first three notes I made were these important safety tips:

• Make the costume eye holes big enough so your child’s vision is not impaired. Peripheral vision can be blocked if the holes are too small—making crossing streets in the costume very dangerous. To be completely safe, use face paint instead of wearing a mask.
• Pumpkin-carving with a sharp knife should be supervised carefully, especially if small children are involved.
• Costumes and party decorations must be fireproof! Pumpkins with candles inside need to be a safe distance from clothing, curtains and anything else that might catch fire.

There are other basic safety rules, especially for trick or treaters. Rather than summarizing them, I think it is more helpful to point you to some top pros:

There is the Red Cross Halloween Safety Tips for Kids and Adults. (Image of the ghost above is from the Red Cross website.)

A commercial website called Halloween Safety Guide has extensive tips for kids, adults, parties, costumes, trick or treating, yard haunts and pet care.

There is also a simple game to play that makes some of the most important points here: Play the Halloween Safety Game. Children who have clicked through the steps to play the game will be made aware of some rules that prevent danger.

Jan Chipchase of Nokia on mobiles

TED Talks: Ideas worth spreading is a series of videos recently made available online from the distinguished conference series of the same name. To go to the TED page where you can watch a talk on the mobile future by top researcher Jan Chipchase of Nokia: click here.

The image above is from the screen behind Chipchase. He says that connections & consequences is the theme for what he describes in the talk. He speaks for 19 minutes and does not mention school safety directly or talk about schools. He describes more fundamentally how mobiles are becoming how connections are made. The mobile principles and phenomena he touches on often have strong implications and insights for the world of schooling both now and in the future. For school safety, connections and their consequences can only be major — and personal mobiles of teachers, administrators, parents and students are certain to play big roles.

If you have the time to listen to the talk, we think you will find it interesting and useful background for planning toward the future.

California cousin: “Thank God for cell phones!”

Some cousins of mine live in San Diego. Reading all the fire news, and seeing it on television, I became increasingly concerned. Yesterday I emailed them to see if they are okay. Their reply brought the good news that their home is thus far out of danger. In her reply, part of which is below, my cousin mentioned how important their cell phone had been on a trip home when they were uncertain of conditions there.

In school evacuations that inevitably scatter students and teachers, the Defywire Mobile Guardian brings a new level of control, communication and calm. The ability of teachers, administrators and parents to reach out for information in a growing crisis provides, as my cousin says, the ability to get the info needed. More and more frequently we are reading about the crucial role of mobile phones in all sorts of crises. Defywire provides schools with the new safety network of mobile communication and access to information about the crisis, about students’ whereabouts and about contacting their guardians.

 

From my San Diego cousin: The entire thing is quite surreal! Ralph’s nephew, Bruce, son of his sister Frances, and his teenage son had to evacuate; they tried to get to us but were not allowed to come south. ALL THE MAJOR ROAD WERE CLOSED!! Had we wanted to leave the county, we would have had to try to go to Mexico! A very sobering thought! My brother and his wife are here from Florida—we had gone north on Sunday to the Pasadena area where our son, Mike, lives with his wife and infant son. We knew of the Malibu fire and a small fire here before we left but didn’t hear much about San Diego during the day. As we drove home, down I-5, the smoke kept getting thicker and thicker. Thank God for cell phones! I called a neighbor to find out where the fire was! I got the info I needed, which was that we weren’t threatened, but the smoke was amazing! We have a lot of falling ash and smoke but almost no wind at our house . . . .

The new fundamentalness of mobile contact

The image above is from a fast-growing part-time employment service in Japan. It is taken from a blog post by entrepreneur Joi Ito, who explains:

My sister has written about the Japanese youth behavior where less and less stuff is planned - the kids going out and using their mobile devices to meet up or deciding to do things while constantly keeping in touch with each other. These swarming bands of kids are now adults and many of them don’t want to be tied down.

These “kids” are not becoming adults. In a recent survey by Otetsudai Networks, most people surveyed cared more about freedom and flexibility than the pay when considering a part-time job.

Enter Otetsudai Networks. With Otetsudai Networks, if you are willing to work, you sign up for the service with your skills and focus, take a GPS reading on your phone and then just hang out. If you are looking for someone for say… 3 hours to man a cash register or help wash dishes, you just send the request to Otetsudai Networks and within minutes, you have a list of people available. The list shows what each person is qualified for, how others have rated their work and exactly how far away they are. Typically you will receive a list of half a dozen or more people within a few minutes.

The image and the employment service are an intriguing window on a fast-arriving future. It is not only the kids in Japan who are creating a new way of doing things with their mobile phones. It is happening to youngsters everywhere. Nowhere is the kid-mobile-phone phenomenon stirring up more change than in schools — which makes sense because that is where the mobile generation is now spending its time.

As digital transformation has rolled across the world over the past decade, schools have lagged behind in some important aspects. That must not happen with school safety. An example like the Otetsudai Networks is a reminder that for today’s kids their mobile phones have become fundamental to their world. To keep abreast of these times, Defywire puts the mobile in the center of a school’s safety initiatives and focuses on the rollout of new ways to keep our kids safe using this central emerging technology.

“Motorcycle School: Be Very Afraid”

The article by the above title in the New York Times is excellent background reading for anyone talking with youngsters who covet motorcycles—or who, as adults, are toying with riding the 2-wheeled power vehicles. The author bases what he writes on a course he had just taken on motorcycle riding, and in particular on the first session which focuses on “everything that can go horribly wrong.”

From a school safety point of view, teaching kids to be careful is a lot more effective when you know what you are talking about. From reading this article, I felt more competent to talk with a youngster intent on riding: “Using a course designed by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, a not-for-profit organization in Irvine, Calif., that is sponsored by several motorcycle manufacturers, Trama’s instructors emphasized the mental commitment that counterbalances the physical act of riding a motorcycle.”

A Johns Hopkins course on injury prevention

The injury prevention we focus on at Defywire is in the school environment, and for students in their broader lives as well. For those of us interested in this focused safety, these online course materials at Johns Hopkins provide perspective and general information: Confronting the Burden of Injuries: A Global Perspective. The lecture materials are provided at no cost in PDF. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health, which is the source of the course, is recognized as perhaps the finest school in the world for public health. Their open courseware, used by professionals and students across the world, is making a significant contribution to training public health practitioners and teachers.

The image above is taken from the first lecture, which is the Introduction. “RTI” stands for Road Traffic Injuries and IPV for Injuries from Personal Violence (abuse). Clearly, to some extent, each injury category has application to school safety. An encouraging report in the introductory lecture is that emphasis on safety is increasing. There is a lot more than you might want to review in the lectures, but you may be interested in taking a look at the perspective of the public health experts at Johns Hopkins.

Having student health information available in crises

An article in Edutopia titled Vital Statistics: Documenting Your Health explores the importance for all of us of having our health records when there is an emergency. The article includes this story illustrating that for students, having access to health records can keep unexpected mishaps from becoming more serious :

Wolter also knows firsthand the usefulness of record keeping in school settings. She created personal health records for 110 teens who went on a trip to Europe. Those came in handy when one youngster was accused of having illicit drugs in his room, and a consultation with the flash drive showed he was prescribed medication for attention deficit disorder. In another case, two kids collided while dancing in a club and one needed stitches. His medical information was at hand and usable by the doctors in Prague.

Defywire Mobile Guardian makes student health information accessible by a few clicks on the mobile phone of a teacher who is coping with a student health crisis.

Talking about shootings with your children

These pages at the FamilyEducation website suggest “the words you need” to talk about school shootings with children at three age levels: 4-to7 years-old, 8-to-12 years-old and teenagers. It is interesting that the advice was written in response to the Littleton, Colorado shootings in 1999, eight years ago, but remains an often visited source. A more recent round-up at msnbc of suggestions for talking with kids about shootings at schools provides similar guidance.

Biking to School: Safety Tip of the Week

Riding your bicycle to school is as American as apple — but with more cars on the road than ever it can also be dangerous. Choose the October 15th Biking to School video here, from Defywire’s 100 Safety Tips, for some basic ways to stay safe. Watch with your kids to help remind them to focus on safety when they are riding their bikes.