Online Safety How to keep our students safe on the Internet

Under the rules established by congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), schools must certify that they have accomplished three specific tasks: 1.Created an Internet safety policy and distributed it to schools 2. Implemented technology-blocking measures to prevent students from accessing inappropriate material from school computer. 3.Conducted a public meeting to disseminate and discuss the school’s new or revised Internet safety policy.

Safety and security of minors when using electronic mail, chat rooms, and other forms of direct electronic communications

Search Engines for Kids: These tools use software (called spiders or robots) to discover, harvest and index web pages (Maze, et al., 1997). Students choosing adult search engines run the risk of entering shark-infested waters with the treasure sunk to the bottom.

The results can be dangerous or rewarding, depending on the dive. –A student misspelled the word “Porsche” by typing “porche” in an adult search engine and ended up with pornography in the top results. –Creators of porn sites place misleading text like “pokemon” or “pokeman” on their pages to trick search engines crawlers into thinking they are relevant, pushing these sites to the top of the hit list.

Lycos’s kid-safe search engine for children ages 12 and up is the only search engine that exclusively uses keyword blocking in the filtering system. Google augmented the safe search engine with the use of block list of SurfWatch’s filtering technology.

As part of the campaign’s kick-off, CNN’s Miles O’Brien hosted an educational forum on Internet Safety.

The campaign offers tips for online safety that parents and children can follow at home. Tips for kids include the following:

1.Do not give out information about yourself or your family without getting permission. 2.Do not respond to anything online that makes you uncomfortable, and tell your parents about it right away. 3.Do not get together with anyone you meet online without getting your parents’ permission first. 4.Do not open or accept s, files, links, URLs, or other things from people you don’t know or trust. 5. Do not give out your password to anyone but your parents or guardians. 1. Do not give out information about yourself or your family without getting permission.

Parents may not be happy to learn that teens’ concerns about safety stem from actual online experiences SafeSu rfin