Internet Safety for Kids -
I know this is important, but sometimes I have real problems with parents in our district who get all bent out of shape about kids using their computers at home. In our school we have seen parents call in about students accessing De.lic.ious accounts at home, downloading GoogleEarth, using district served Moodle Forums. I understand that for some of these people they are nervous about the security of their computer and their response is to let their kids do absolutely nothing with them. Even when you try to explain your reasons for requests and comfort them with the knowledge that a Google Download is definitely coming from a trusted site, they still won't do it.
One of the big challenges we are going to be facing next year is to educate our parents and community about appropriate downloads and ways they can actually improve their computer and its capabilities. As ironic as this sounds I think we are planning on having a newsletter (on actual paper) go out about some of these technology issues.
The flip side of this of course is that some of these same parents let their students go on all sorts of sites without any sort of supervision at all hours of the night. They care so much about their computer, but not really what their students use it for. My last story of frustration was a student who came in and told me they couldn't do their homework, online, because they had been grounded. Thinking this was impossible, I emailed the parent. Sure enough they were not going to let their child use the computer at home because of some discipline issue. I'll never understand how someone would tell their middle schooler who was trying to do their homework that they couldn't do it because they were in trouble.
Sorry this post became so negative, but this is a frustrating issue when we do so much to try and protect and guide our students online and it often is lost on our parents, whether it be through lack of understanding or lack of concern.
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