There seems to be three main negative reactions by schools and school boards with regards to internet safety when it comes to social networking sites, weblogs and other areas where students publish online.

BAN – Schools and school boards try to enforce a ban of using such areas by instituting a stealthy method of keeping students under a watchful eye. This could be reactionary through suspension for a particular online post, or proactively through an acceptable use policy.

BLOCK – School and school boards may use filtering software to hide various web sites from students while they are on board or school networked computers, perhaps relying on legal advice that the institutions would not be responsible for what students are doing at home.

BURY – A result of the first two reactions, any internet safety issues goes deeper and buries itself so that it becomes difficult for schools and school boards to address.

I am certainly not advocating for the removal of acceptable use policies or filtering software because they do have there respective places, but relying on these tools solely as the means for keeping our students safe is absurd.

EDUCATE – We need to educate our students in the appropriate places and times when information should be shared, if it should at all. We need to teach our students how to positively contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the World Wide Web.  We need to inform our students how to communicate in a brave new world we call the read/write web.

Our curriculum expectations (at least in our province) may allude to internet safety but this is not enough for every teacher to include it in their lessons. Perhaps another sign that government policy is having trouble keeping up with the changes happening on the World Wide Web.  But even if it did appear, the problem is that there are not enough educators in the classroom that understand this brave new world in order to frame it appropriately for our children. My fear is that we will end up banning, blocking or burying, rather than educating.

I would love to integrate internet safety, online research, online collaboration, and online communication into our classroom vocabulary by embedding it into curriculum expectations in various subjects. I hope that we will have enough foresight in this province for the future and safety of our children.

A little update here:

I posted this, and then was reading Doug Johnson’s Blog about another article and an excellent response by Jason Johnson. I emailed out this response to a few people.

The next day I was asked to be part of a team to participate in a provincial iniatiative called Cybercops, which concentrates on internet safety for Grade 7 and 8 students. Perhaps, a little mixture of serendipity and fate.