Palo Alto School Council Adopts Cyber Safety Plan
By Hubert Huang
PALO ALTO, Jan. 26 -- The Hoover Elementary site council announced at its monthly site council meeting that it has asked the Palo Alto Unified School District to adapt a cyber-safety plan it is developing for Jordan Middle School into one appropriate for elementary school students.
Although the plan is still in its developmental stages, the cornerstone of the plan will be an education night where experts in cyber-safety will outline practices for both parents and students to ensure safe use of the Internet. The practices would include managing content available to children and often overlooked issues, such as placing the computer where the parent can monitor their children's usage. Thus far, no official date for the completion of the plan has been announced.
"You have generations of parents and administrators who aren't screen savvy," said Susanne Scott, principal of Hoover Elementary. "And I'd be the first one in line for training."
Already, all classrooms at Hoover have computers equipped with a broadband connection to the Internet. In addition, there are two "mobile labs" a fleet of laptops that teachers can reserve, if they require additional computer terminals for their students.
Scott says the incorporation of computers into the school's curriculum plans has caused a digital divide to develop within many households, where the children have a greater understanding of the computer and Internet's capabilities than their parents. And it's a problem that continues to grow as residential high-speed connections become increasingly more common.
Scott says teachers have devised strategies -such as bookmarking pages that their lesson will use in advance and having students sign a contract that explains what constitutes appropriate use of the Internet in the classroom-to prevent students from wandering into sites with inappropriate content during class. However, they cannot control students' activities once they leave the school.
And from the perspective of several Site Council members, as the students' proficiency in navigating the virtual environment increases, so does the potential danger for the children.
Hoover Elementary teacher and Site Council member George Flath expressed concern after overhearing discussions in his 5th grade class about MySpace.com, a social networking site that some pedophiles have used to locate kids. Fellow Site Council member Tom Serter, whose child attends Hoover Elementary, realized the danger of Internet surfing after seeing the obscene messages sometimes transmitted in email.
Lately, Scott says the student?s internet use has begun to negatively affect students' behavior. She has observed arguments break out between students because one student had killed the other while playing a networked video game together the night before.
Contact Hubert Huang at hhboy77@stanford.edu
