by Jeffrey L. Hunt, Ed.D.
High school students are drawn to networking and sharing. Watch them in the school locker bays, the cafeteria, or huddled in their groups at the local hang out. They like to talk, share, and be together. Social networking sites on the Internet are a natural, highly popular extension of this desire to connect and there’s not much educators or parents can do to stop it. But that doesn’t mean that networking sites with a purely social purpose have a place on campus.
At Indian Prairie School District in Illinois, appropriate technology use policies (which can be found online at http://it.ipsd.org/policy) are based on the following guidelines:
* Relevance to the Curriculum: The Board of Education’s policy directs the administration on appropriate Internet use – stating clearly that the Internet is to be used in school for curriculum purposes. Guided by this directive, the key stakeholders have worked together to create sound Internet use policies in which priority is given to curriculum activities and non-curriculum uses are limited.
* Consistency: Any technology uses need to be consistent with other policies and practices. For example, policy and safe practices dictate that outsiders are not to approach children to speak with them. To be consistent with this, the technical configuration of the district’s network disallows online activities that would make it easy for outsiders to contact students in a non-supervised way.
* Needs-driven Access: From a technical point of view, a guiding principle for the district’s technology leaders is that it’s easier to open ports and activate protocols when a need is identified than to close them later when inappropriate use is discovered. The decision has been made to limit ports and protocols to those that are necessary for curriculum activities, for communication with parents, for employee productivity, and to conduct school district business. If a new need arises in any of these areas, the necessary ports and protocols will be opened
The district’s email policy provides an example. Since email is important for a number of high school projects, and some middle school uses as well, the district has a student e-mail server and creates student accounts with the permission of parents. Students are not permitted to access any outside e-mail accounts while they’re on campus, however (nor are teachers). With the e-mail on-site and "owned" by the district – and terms and conditions agreed to by students and parents when they sign up – district administrators can act quickly to assist a student who is being harassed by email or deny privileges to one who is abusing the system. With outside services, such action would require going to court.
District policies not only serve to keep students safe but also to preserve bandwidth for curriculum purposes. Last year, for example, the decision was made to block streaming music from local radio stations because the music that both students and teachers were streaming to their computers for entertainment purposes was taking up 15 percent of the system’s bandwidth – making it more difficult for educational activities to take place.
Streaming video raises similar issues. District technology leaders have determined that content from such news-related sources as CNN and United Streaming/Discovery are important to the curriculum and they are not blocked – although attempts are made to download the video after hours. Although Google Video and Youtube are usually blocked, when a teacher has a curriculum purpose for using one of these sites, we work with them to unblock individual videos or to temporarily grant access to the entire site.
Other protective measures that the district has taken include:
* Using a desktop protection program that removes keyloggers, unauthorized software, and other malware when the computers are rebooted;
* Using software to deny file saving for files that might violate copyrights, contain viruses or contain scripts;
* Requiring any outside service that handles student information to agree that the district will have access, without going to court, to any information that is needed for ensuring student safety.
As times change, so do the Indian Prairie policies. District educators are receptive to exploring educationally relevant uses of social networking. But they are committed to doing so in ways that protect students from predators, allow adults to legally intervene when appropriate, and preserve bandwidth for curriculum uses.
Jeffrey Hunt is the director of instructional technology at Indian Prairie School District 204 in suburban Chicago.
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