Staying safe in cyberspace

NEA Today, Sep 1998

This Internet class teaches teens to think before they click.

Who:

Cheryl Harrigan, computer teacher, Hanford High School, Hanford, California

Inspiration:

Put 30 teenagers in front of 30 computers, give them a self-directed curriculum with free time for surfing the Net and sending E-mail-and try not to worry that they'll stray off task and get into inappropriate Web sites.

Sound like a challenge? That's why Harrigan designed her course to cover not only technical skills, but also how to use the Net safely and responsibly.

"Learning to build Web pages is okay, but it's not enough," she explains. "Kids also need to know what's okay and not okay to do." Lesson:

Before they can go online, tenth to twelfth graders in Harrigan's "Internet Use and Application" course spend a week reviewing class rules. They also must sign school and district acceptable use policies.

By positioning cyberspace as an extension of the classroom, "I'm able to successfully communicate what's expected, because they already know what's expected of them in school," Harrigan says.

Penalties for violating the rules can be severe-removal from class, a failing grade, and even loss of all computer privileges for the rest of a student's high school years.

Of course, accidents can happen. One day, a student looking for clip art searched on the phrase "free pictures" -which in Netspeak means something quite different.

"She clicked on a link, and she got an eyeful!" Harrigan says. "It was embarrassing-and it was an accident. You can't bust a kid for an accident." Instead, Harrigan seized the teaching moment to caution students to examine URLs carefully before following hyperlinks.

"I tell them, if it says www.fornicate.com, then don't go there!" she says. Or, she instructs them, back out of the site quickly and notify her so that she can flag the misstep in her log.

Harrigan periodically checks Web browser history lists to see where kids have been.

Still, her biggest worry isn't questionable Web sites-it's that "kids think they're too invulnerable," she says. "They're too free in giving out information about themselves."

Once, Harrigan noticed a student writing an E-mail to a boy she had met in a chat room the night before, on her home computer. Harrigan warned the student about the dangers of giving out her name or address.

"I told her, `The guy might tell you he's 17, but in reality he could be a 50year-old pervert,"' she says.

Click:

In the end, staying out of trouble is the students' responsibility. "I can encourage, I can plead, and I can beg, but I can't control them," Harrigan says. "That's something they have to choose for themselves."

Harrigan hopes students remember the reasons behind class policies when they go online at home.

"When they leave class, they need to know there's still a right and a wrong," she says.