[computer use in the classroom] [email] [school websites] [surfing the net] [chat rooms]

[internet proficiency scheme for primary children]

Computer use within the classroom, surfing the internet and email projects bring with them inherent danger to pupils. Careful consideration of advice from your authority, advisers and ICT Coordinator is important  in drawing up a school policy to protect the health and safety of your pupils. 

I have included in this section articles and some guidelines from the Department and Education and Skills to assist you in your decision making.

Computer use in the classroom

To consider:

Monitors - are they at eye height; is the brightness adjusted to prevent eye strain; can the monitor be swivelled to reduce reflection from sunlight; does the room have blinds or window filters to reduce reflected sunlight on screens; is it in a safe position and will not be knocked of by a pupil walking past; for children with poor eyesight is the monitor adjusted for large fonts; is light from the room reflecting on the screen, if so how do you stop it; do you have fluorescent lights in the room (the flickering of the computer screen and together with that of fluorescent lights can occasionally cause an epileptic fit); have you considered a large monitor, interactive whiteboard or a projector for demonstrating how to use the computer?

Mouse - is the mouse the right size for your pupils (do you need a smaller size for younger pupils?); is it suitable for right and left handers; do you have desk space to move the mouse to the left or right hand side of the computer; have you told the children that they can move the mouse to the other side of the keyboard (many left handed children suffer in silence); do you use tracker balls to assist more clumsy children; do the children need wrist supports?

Chairs - are they adjustable to the height of your benches and the height of your pupils; do they give back support?

Benching - is it at the right height for the height of your pupils; is there enough space allocated for the number of pupils using each computer; are there any sharp edges? 

Room - is there space for pupils to work away from the computer; is there enough space in the room to accommodate all the pupils in your class at once; is there sufficient ventilation; is the room secure?

Supervision - are you able to supervise all your children when all or some of them are working on the computers? In some schools small computer suites (not big enough to take all the class) are situated away from the classroom. How will you supervise all the children? Can you make use of a classroom assistant or a parent? 

Classroom Experts - If you have a large class and you are working with children both on and off the computer it is often difficult for you to give children all the assistance they might need with the computer. You might be able to make use of "classroom experts" (children with more experience or expertise with computers) to help other children in their use of the computers? It is important, however, not to over burden these children. They need to have time to learn too. It may be a good idea to split the supporting role between a number of children on a rota basis. This way the children also learn to support and work together as a community. In other words we have the beginnings of responsible citizenship.

Technical Support - do you have access to a technician to maintain and update the computers on a regular basis; have you thought of remote management? It is too much for a teacher to be expected to maintain the school computers whilst holding down a full time teaching post. Have you thought about sharing a technician with another school?

Locking the Desktop - have you installed software to stop changes to the desktop? Children love altering the screen saver, the wallpaper and the mouse icon. This is great in a way because they learn to how to control the computer. 

However, the danger of not locking the desktop is that start-up pages with pornographic adverts can be saved onto the desktop. (I have seen this even when filtering software is in place). Most networks will have the capability of  limiting what pupils can save in their desktop preferences. If you are not able to do this you will need to purchase software which will. Winlock is a programme which worked very well for me but there will be other products on the market.

• Health, Safety and Computer
  
  
• Staying Healthy at Your PC - Lawrence J. Magid

Email
The original intention in the UK was to give all pupils an email address and many pupils do now have these. The British government has drawn back from this position and is now recommending that class based emails are used. I know that some schools find this difficult and still want to issue individual email addresses for project work. Again it is matter for you to decide of how you can properly safe guard your pupils and yet give them freedom of the internet. For some schools the way round this is to use secure web sites such as Epals for sharing information on each other's schools and countries.

• E-mail addresses at school
  

School Web Sites - Photographs
School websites are a wonderful way of sharing information not only with parents with but the rest of the world. In building your web site you will want to give people a real flavour of what your school is about. One way to do this is to use photographs.

It is important however to protect the identities of your children. Some authorities go as far as saying that there should be no photographs of children on school web sites. Others say that photographs should be used with caution and that no child should be pictured in a state of undress such as when doing PE. That goes without saying! 

It is the photographs which cause the most heart ache with schools. The photographs often make the web site and so many schools have worked out their own compromise including:

• only first names to be used or no names at all
  
  
• first names or photographs to be used but not both together



• consider using photographs of children in groups

Children on the net - Alan Travis, Home Affairs editor
Wednesday March 21 2001, The Guardian. Includes guidelines for the use of children's photos on the net.

Surfing the Net
The internet is a huge resource of information. No longer are children restricted to the books in the school library. They can reach out to the rest of the world both in time and space. What the internet can offer will grow and get better especially as broadband and everything that this will offer becomes more common place. 

Unfortunately there is unsuitable material out there too. In locus parentis, teachers are responsible for what pupils have access to. The only way to restrict what pupils can and cannot access is to use filtering software. Filtering blocks access to undesirable web sites or content.

Filtering software, however, can also be restrictive in what pupils can look at depending on the criteria of the software itself. For example, software which filters out sites because of the percentage of bare flesh will also filter out museums and art galleries. I have even known filtering software to filter out biology sites and towns because they include the word "sex" in them.

Secondary schools sometimes consider a responsible school policy for their pupils. After all, with a web server it is possible to track which web sites pupils are surfing. An instant ban for a pupil breaking the rules is lesson enough for some. With younger children, however, it is all too easy for them to accidentally surf onto a pornographic site. For instance you would think that www.toymaster.com would be innocent enough. Try it and see for yourself. 

Filtering software is therefore essential for younger pupils and for older pupils where there is not time to supervise their surfing. 

Filtering is either done by your service provider (ISP) or can  be done by you. Whether you or your ISP do the filtering it is important to keep an eye on which sites are being blocked and which sites are getting through. There should be a section in the Internet Agreement that the children sign that they are asked to report any web site which upsets them.

If you are in a school with a web server, you should also be able to get reports on which users are trying to access prohibited sites. Again, as part of your Internet policy, children will know that they are expected to conform to the agreed usage of the internet and know what consequences they will face for trying to access "banned" sites on school computers. However, it is important to also know that children can accidentally try to access unacceptable sites. Real tact is necessary in determining in which cases access to prohibited sites is deliberate and in which cases it is accidental.

The Parents Information Network has an excellent review section of a number of filtering software.

A good account of filtering software can be found at:

Internet Filter Systems and filtering pupils' access on the Internet

Software information can be found at:

Net Nanny

Cybersitter

Information on Fire Walls and Walled Gardens:

Firewalls

Walled Gardens

Chat Rooms
How do you protect children in Chatrooms? 
The answer is that you can't. 
So then how do you stop them from using Chat Rooms?
Unless you can use a filter to filter out all the Chat Rooms, the answer is you can't. Many of the Search Engines themselves have Chat Rooms. So if you are prepared to filter out all the Search Engines you may be somewhere there but in the end you won't succeed. To satisfy curiosity, one suggestion is to have your own Chat Room. Indeed Eton have done this. It is fairly easy to set your own Chat Room up. The website Scripts for Educators has an excellent script for a simple Chat Room. You can see the Chat Room I created at:

http://www.gardenlaw.co.uk/chat/chatmain.html

Just think, you could have live discussion with another school on the other side of the world. You could have all sorts of projects where you could use this facility. eg. geographical. environmental, literacy projects etc

Using chat in the classroom
Somebody to talk to? - Peter Palmer March 20 2001 The Guardian. Article on Chat rooms and the dangers young people face.
Monitoring Organisations and Systems

Internet Proficiency Scheme for Primary Children

An Internet Proficiency Teaching Pack for Primary Children is available from January 2002. 
It will include photocopiable/downloadable certificates to be awarded to pupils by their teacher, together with fun activities and quizzes.

The aims of the scheme are to:

• develop safe behaviour when using the Internet
• provide teachers with materials and activities to help develop safe behaviour when children are using the Internet
• enable pupils to demonstrate what they know and understand about using the Internet safely and demonstrate their safe use of the Internet.

"The safe behaviours will be mapped against the skills, knowledge and understanding set out in the National Curriculum and Schemes of Work for IT at Key Stage 2. It will also build on the exemplification materials being developed for Key Stage 2 Schemes of Work." (Becta)

More information can be found on the Becta web site at:

http://www.becta.org.uk/schools/smanagers/jul1101internet.html

Other Reading

Safety fears limit online learning - BBC News Online - Education (27 November 2001)

Institute for Public Policy Research

Citizens Online

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