Kevin Kearney's List: Child Internet Protection

Acceptable Internet Use Policy

FCC Consumer Facts

Websites that are collecting information
from children under the age of thirteen are required to comply with
Federal Trade Commission
( FTC ) Children's Online
Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Digital Citizenship is a concept which helps teachers, technology leaders and parents to understand what students/children/technology users should know to use technology appropriately. Digital Citizenship is more than just a teaching tool; it is a way to prepare students/technology users for a society full of technology. Too often we are seeing students as well as adults misusing and abusing technology but not sure what to do. The issue is more than what the users do not know but what is considered appropriate technology usage.

i-SAFE Inc. is a leading publisher of media literacy and digital citizenship education materials and programming with worldwide distribution channels. Founded in 1998 and supported by the U.S. Congress and various executive agencies of the U.S. government,
i-SAFE is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating and empowering youth (and others) to safely, responsibly and productively use Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). i-SAFE’s best practices classroom curriculum for primary and secondary school students is embedded with dynamic community outreach activities to empower students, teachers, parents, law enforcement professionals, and other community members to control their online experiences by proficiently and independently exercising a learned and practiced ability to use the Internet and other ICT with a level of sophistication that results in increased safety and utility.

On June 4, 2010, the Federal Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG) released its final report, Youth Safety on a Living Internet. This report offers a comprehensive set of recommendations on internet safety education, as well as other related topics. Importantly, OSTWG notes that “one size fits all” strategies to internet education are apt to be ineffective. Instead, the report recommends a “layered approach” to internet safety education that provides levels of education/support akin to the three-tier Response to Intervention (RTI) model.

Picture this scenario: a student logs in to your school's network using the password of a former teacher and "improves" his first-quarter grades and attendance along with those of his nine friends. This is just one real-life example of the many kinds of network security breaches occurring at schools across the country. How big is the problem? Purdue University's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security decided to investigate the issue by performing penetration tests on the networks of five Indiana school districts-in other words, hacking into their systems with permission. The results were alarming. The testing team was able to hack into all five networks via the Internet. In four of the five schools, they accessed payroll and grade information without difficulty; and in three cases, they were able to easily obtain a complete list of students and staff. Perhaps most troubling of all, these attacks and security compromises went undetected by school IT staff.