Parental
Controls and Your Student
As we begin to incorporate
the internet as part of the learning experience – sometimes assigning specific
websites or a research topic that involves searching several of them, issues of
safety are a major concern.
There are two ways for
parents to maintain control of their children’s use of the internet. The first is old-fashioned monitoring –
observing what your child is looking at, setting time limits, and so on. The second is by trusting the parental
controls set up for your children’s internet account.
Most major internet servers
have secondary children’s accounts available; if they do not, several software
packages are available online that do much the same thing.
We encourage you to implement
these controls – but also to be aware that sometimes a “gray area” occurs when
some sites are blocked that may be OK to use, and also sometimes unanticipated
material becomes available through an “approved site”.
Take the case of
“whitehouse.com” for instance. Before
major services became aware of the existence of this shadow site, kids who
typed in “.com.” instead of the more official “whitehouse.gov” or even
“whitehouse.net” were directed to an imitation white house site that contained
off-color material. On AOL at least,
this site is blocked. Is it in yours?
Please take a moment and
review the following parental control checklist. By doing so you will be assured that the
level of safety meets school expectations as well as allows for reasonable use.
Parental
Controls Checklist
√ Students are not allowed to make a website
√ All chat is adult supervised (online, in the room)
√ To access a questionable site, they
have to type in parents’
password
√ Students can’t send attachments with mail
√ Students can’t IM
√ There are limitations using
search engines
√ For some sites – NEOPIA is one – hard
copy signed permission
forms must be mailed in
√ “