Chris Betcher

When students at our school get to Year 3 they are given their own school email account. We are a Google Apps for Education school, so the email they get is a rebadged Gmail account, and part of my role is to teach them to use it. We do lots of work on digital citizenship and we try really hard to give our students opportunities to be responsible members of the online world, but at the point they get their email we really just want to make sure they know the mechanics of using it... how to compose a message, how to reply and forward, the difference between cc: and bcc:, etc. In those early days of getting their gmail account I really just want them to get the hang of it by using it. Around the same time as they get their email account, they also do a thematic unit of work about national parks where they look at several of Australia's most prominent national parks and learn about what they are and what they do. I had a bit of a wacky idea for integrating the use of email into their ...

I've never understood why people send spam mail or leave spam comments on blog posts (in the same way I don't understand why people scribble graffiti tags on trains and walls), but I know that for spammers who really take it seriously there is big money to be made. I suppose in that sense, I DO understand why people create spam if there is the opportunity to make money from it... I guess what I don't understand is how there continues to be constant stream of people who are gullible enough to take action on the messages and, in doing so, continue to generate an income for the spammers. Let's face it, the thing that keeps spam propagating and growing (and therefore making it worthwhile for the spammers to keep sending it) is the fact that there are enough gullible, stupid people in the world who keep responding to it.  If we all were much better at identifying and recognising spam as soon as we saw it, then the spammers would eventually go away because the f...