Working with high school students, this task is sometimes made more difficult because students already regularly access and publish material to social media sites so their ideas of acceptable use may already be formed. My school district does a great job at filtering inappropriate content so students rarely access inappropriate images at school, and when they do, they tend to have the maturity to close the page; they understand that when publishing or linking to a site they should be familiar with the content of that site to ensure it is appropriate. Their in-class use of the Internet is respectable and acceptable; yet, as a senior English teacher, preparing my students for life in the “real world,” one of the components I feel the need to address with students is the need for Internet safety outside the school building, where filtering software and password-protected teacher blogs do not exist. Accordingly, I’ve included below a few strategies that I’ve personally used for addressing Internet safety and general best practices for using the Internet with my students:
1. Teach students how to perform effective searches. Avoiding unwanted or inappropriate material on the Internet can first be achieved by learning how to search for the needed, wanted material effectively. Richardson (2010) suggests creating guided web tours for younger students, but this practice is valuable for older students as well. Restricting students to appropriate sites that have been linked to a teacher webpage ensures students are accessing quality material and makes them familiar with what such quality material looks and sounds like. Moreover, the search process is accomplished much more quickly since students do not find themselves performing extraneous searches for personal pleasure! Yet, when free Internet searching is appropriate, teachers should take the time to demonstrate academic search engines besides Google. Teaching students how to correctly search Galileo or Google Scholar, or even just how to use advanced search features in Google, can go a long ways in ensuring that students quickly access the material needed instead of spending hours filtering through irrelevant or inappropriate sites. Meris Stansbury at eSchool news suggests several ways teachers across the United States are addressing Internet safety in their classrooms, and one idea is another that I have personally used in the classroom: asking students to evaluate the validity and reliability of several websites, one of which is a hoax. A hoax website is simple for a teacher to create personally, using Weebly or Wix, but several sample hoax websites can also be found online. Learning how to question the authenticity of a website helps direct students to websites with quality, reputable information, and most of the time these sites do not contain potentially unsafe material!
2. Be real with students about the potential dangers lurking on the Internet. Demonstrate for students not only how to protect their privacy for school assignments, but how to protect their privacy on the sites they access outside of school. As Richardson (2010) reminds us, many states have laws restricting the amount of personal information about students that can be published on a school website, so its easy to remind students when publishing to their school blog that pictures showing their faces, clues about their actual address, or full listings of their name or birthday should be avoided. Common Sense Media perhaps says it best: “There’s no such thing as ‘private’ online.” Therefore, high school students especially must be aware that while those same privacy restrictions at school may not extend beyond the school building, the concerns should. Part of the senior English curriculum at my school involves helping students to prepare a college application and a job resume, and to practice interviewing for a job. Although professional appearance, first impressions, and academic background are all stressed in these tasks, we’ve recently begun addressing with students the ways in which their lives on the Internet could jeopardize their professional aspirations. Asking students to examine their Facebook privacy settings or to reconsider the type of pictures they text to their friends are all conversations that must be a part of a “let’s be real” discussion about Internet safety. The New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services has some great resources for students, including a PowerPoint presentation and accompanying videos of real cases involving high school students on message boards, information posted on Facebook, and sexting practices of teens.
3. Get parents involved. Parent information sessions and workshops about Internet safety can go a long ways in keeping students safe on the Internet, since parents are the eyes and ears monitoring students’ Internet practices at home. Even posting this information to a class website for parents to access on their own can be beneficial. Especially if students are being asked to use the Internet at home to complete school assignments, it becomes the school’s responsibility to help parents also navigate the Internet successfully; to use the analogy mentioned earlier—parents already know how to use written books, and they may be familiar with word processing programs, but their knowledge of safe practices on the Internet may be just as limited as that of their students. Common Sense’s blog post for parents about helping their children stay safe on the Internet is beneficial, and the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services’ resources for parents, including a PowerPoint presentation and real-life videos, reinforce to parents the severity of potential harms on the Internet.
Just because there are potential safety concerns doesn’t mean that the Internet should be abolished from education. If we adopted that philosophy we’d eliminate books for fear they may fall on a student’s foot, paper since it may inflict paper cuts, and pencils since students could poke out someone’s eye. Clearly, such thinking is ridiculous, as is eliminating technology and the Internet in the classroom because of the fears of potential dangers. Instead, the approach must instead involve teaching students how to use these resources safely so that their benefits may be maximized and their dangers minimized.
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.