With Britain in deep freeze last week, criticism skidded in all directions over nationwide School Closures. As closures peaked at just under 50% of schools on Wednesday the 6th, the government reminded headteachers that “every lesson counts”, the refrain of their anti-truancy drive, while the General Secretary of the National Association of Headteachers countered that “every lesson is important, but so is every limb.” Meanwhile, small business leaders complained that parents unable to find childcare were staying home in droves.

With about 12,000 schools closed the BBC estimated that about one million snowmen were built nationwide. But whether or not you think that snowman-building is a Life Skill, it seems likely that for many kids the extra days of holiday were spent in front of a warm screen, not running around outside.

Now, I certainly shouldn't talk about anyone clocking in too much time in front of the computer. But I did start thinking, while I was snowed in last week, about how technology could help make no-school days more productive for young children.

What if a Primary School teacher could connect to all their colleagues and all their resources from home? What if parents could access via a mobile a bulletin of what their child would be learning that day, with tips on how to help them with their homework? What if students could access all their schoolwork in the same safe network as their friends, so they could collaborate and chat outside school whatever the weather? It's ideas like these that Kwercus is working on, to bring safe and useful digital networking into early schooling.

Of course, I wouldn't want to suggest that kids shouldn't have the experience of Snow Days if they can. I have a few too many good memories of neighbourhood-wide snowball battles for that.

But if there were a commonly understood network of communication surrounding schools, then even snow-days could ALSO be an opportunity for teachers, parents and students to come together over a small inspiring experiment in, say, chemical states as applied to ice-cream.

There’s a significant amount of debate over the issue of homework in Primary Schools, with many arguing it does more harm than good. But an active, familiar communication channel between teachers and families could be used not just for dispensing assignments but for trading suggestions and news and for building a working partnership between parents and teachers.

And I think that’s something worth aiming for.

Facebook’s  new Privacy system greeted users last week with a pop-up window inviting them to review their privacy under the new settings. The move touched off a storm of coverage from blogs and newspapers scrambling to understand and critique the new rules.

The consensus from journalists and privacy professionals was that useful new controls had been introduced which allowed users to fine-tune who could see each of your Facebook updates. But recognition of these new tools available “under the hood” as CNet’s Rafe Needleman put it was usually accompanied with criticism of the new privacy “reception” page or “Transition tool”, which users only see once when they first log in. This page presented a new option to share with “Everyone” which, many argued, would encourage or “push” users to share more.

The original “Transition tool” seen by some users

The Electronic Frontier Foundation strongly criticised the “Transition tool” shown above, because it “recommended” the “Share with Everyone” option by pre-selecting it before the user did anything. It’s important to note that this wasn’t my experience when I logged in late on Wednesday: presumably in response to criticism, Facebook seem to have changed the tool so that the user’s “Old Settings” are pre-selected.

While giving users new privacy tools is undoubtedly a good thing, it does seem strange that Facebook presented users with such a stark choice between sharing with “everyone” and retaining their “old settings”. Many journalists and bloggers argue that this choice of defaults alone represented an encouragement or “push” to users to share with everyone.

Why would some people assume that Facebook wants everyone to share everything? Well, mainly because it’s widely speculated that Facebook wants to move its business into Real-Time Search: it wants people to use its search function to find out what people are saying about a topic right now, in the same way that people currently use Twitter Search.

But for us, the whole incident is evidence of the importance of user literacy and awareness. The fact that Facebook was prepared to interrupt every single user’s experience with a pop-up encouraging them to review their privacy is itself a good sign. The evidence that Facebook have responded to public pressure to reverse a potentially disastrous choice of defaults is certainly cause for cheer.

But people online, and children especially, need to be aware that there are safe and unsafe ways to use social networking, just like there are safe and unsafe ways to cross the street.

The Facebook press room says that only about 25% of Facebook users change their privacy settings from the default. That’s a startlingly small number.

When too few people understand the importance of privacy settings, as is clear from Facebook’s own statistics, it doesn’t matter how many options Facebook introduces to allow people to keep themselves safe. This gives Facebook a responsibility to look after its users, point them towards Privacy and maintain a basic level of safety. But it should tell us that we also have a responsibility to educate ourselves and the next generation about the systems we use. And especially so when one of those systems is a multi-billion dollar information brokerage with a “population” approaching that of the United States.

And that’s a sign of the times.