By Ron Benvenisti. Now that the school season is here and as a result, the Internet topic is in the forefront again. I would like to share with the readers twenty six “rules” for schools, both private and public that I adapted from Scott McLeod’s “26 Internet Safety Talking Points (for Schools), which is reproduced according to the Creative Commons attribution-share alike copyright license. While I don’t personally agree with all of them, I certainly think a lot of issues are raised which certainly need to be thought about. I put them forth here mainly to have a forum through your comments regarding this very controversial subject in our community.
*Even though they may use fancy terms and know more than you do about their domain, you never would allow your business manager or special education coordinator to operate without oversight. So stop doing so with your technology coordinator.
*The technology function of your school organization exists to serve the educational function, not the other way around. Corollary: your technology coordinator works for you, not vice versa.
*Mobile phones, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs, Wikispaces, Google, and whatever other technologies you’re blocking are not inherently evil. Stop demonizing them and focus on people’s behavior, not the tools, particularly when it comes to making policy.
*You don’t need special policies for specific tools. Just check that the policies you have are inclusive of electronic communication channels and then enforce the policies you already have on bullying, cheating, harassment, inappropriate communication, illicit behavior, etc. and the consequences are enforced.
*Why are you penalizing the 95% for the 5%? You don’t do this in other areas of discipline at school. Even though you know some students will use their voices or bodies inappropriately in school, you don’t ban everyone from speaking or moving. You know some students may become drunk on Purim or during Purim fundraising, yet you don’t cancel the fundraising because of a few rule breakers. Instead, you assume that most students will act appropriately most of the time and then you enforce reasonable expectations and policies for the occasional few that don’t including providing a designated driver rather than flat-out prohibition. Just as you don’t put entire schools on lockdown every time there’s a fight in the cafeteria, you need to stop penalizing entire student bodies because of statistically-infrequent, worst-case scenarios.
*You never can promise 100% safety. For instance, you never would promise a parent that her child would never, ever be in a fight at school. So quit trying to guarantee 100% safety when it comes to technology. Provide reasonable supervision, implement reasonable procedures and policies, and move on.
*The idea that ‘online predators will prey on your schoolchildren’ is a false scare tactic that is fed to us by the media, politicians, law enforcement, and computer security vendors. The actual number of reported incidents to schoolchildren in the news of this occurring is zero.
*Federal laws do not require your draconian filtering. You can’t point the finger somewhere else. You have to own it yourself.
*Students and teachers rise to the level of the expectations that you have for them. If you expect the worst, that’s what you’ll get.
*Schools that ‘loosen up’ with students and teachers find that they have no more problems than they did before. And, often, they have fewer problems because folks aren’t trying to get around the restrictions.
*There’s a difference between a teachable moment and a punishable moment. Lean toward the former as much as possible.
*If your community is pressuring you to be more restrictive, that’s when it’s time to educate, not capitulate. Overzealous blocking and filtering has real and significant negative impacts on information access, student learning, pedagogy, ability to address required curricular standards, and educators’ willingness to integrate technology. It also makes it awfully tough to prepare students for a digital era.
*Overly filtered online environments prevent the occurrence of valid and valuable learning connections with the outside world.
*If you’re prohibiting teachers from being ‘friends’ with students online, are you also prohibiting them from being ‘friends’ with students in neighborhoods, at church or shul, in volunteer organizations and in other non-school settings?
*Schools with mindsets of enabling powerful student learning usually block much less than those that don’t. Their first reaction is ‘how can we make this work?’ rather than ‘we need to keep this out.’
*As the lead learner, it’s your responsibility to actively monitor what’s being filtered and blocked and to always reconsider that on an ongoing basis in light of learning and teaching needs.
*If you trust your teachers with the children, you should trust them with the Internet. Besides, mistrust of teachers drives away good educators.
*If you make it too hard to get permission to unblock something, you might as well not have the option to unblock in the first place.
*This is a sticky issue but students and staff have speech and privacy rights, particularly off-campus. Remember that any decision you make is has a good chance of going viral online (As we have seen). Do you really want to be the next story on a well read blog?
*Remember, we live in America, when you violate the Constitution and punish kids just because you don’t like what they legally said or did you not only run the risk of incurring financial liability for your school system in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars but also abuse your position of trust and send messages to students about the corruption of power and disregard for the rule of law.
*Never make a policy you can’t enforce.
*Don’t abdicate your teaching responsibility. Students do not magically gain the ability at the end of the school day or after graduation to navigate complex, challenging, unfiltered digital information spaces. If you don’t teach them how to navigate the unfiltered Internet appropriately and safely while you have them, who’s going to?
*Acceptable use and other policies send messages to students, staff, and parents. Is the predominant message that you want to send really that ‘the technologies that are transforming everything around us should first and foremost be feared?’
*Imagine a scale with two balancing pans. On one side are all of the anxieties, fears, barriers, challenges, and perceived problems that your staff, parents, and community members put forth. If you want effective technology integration and implementation to occur in your school system, it is your job as the leader to tip the scale the other way. It is difficult to understand the learning power of digital technologies – and easy to dismiss their pedagogical usefulness – if you are not familiar enough with them to understand their positive affordances.
*In a hyper connected, technology-suffused, digital, global world, you do your children a disservice – and highlight your irrelevance – by blocking out our present and their future.
*Educating is always, always more powerful than blocking.
Our Gedolim tell us – children should not be exposed to the internet at all despite the educational opportunities!!!!!!
I should therefore not have to answer any of the points mentioned above but will just touch on a few.
Students do not magically gain the ability at the end of the school day or after graduation to navigate complex, challenging, unfiltered digital information spaces. SO What? Let them not learn this at all until they are in a work environment where this is required.
A teacher may be “friends” with a student in a neighborhood or place of worship, but that situation automatically has much more supervision, is a more visible situation, (even then there’s predators as we all know) Kal Vachomer with an “on-line” friend.
I believe that I spoke with Mr. Benvenisti when I first started advocating for the district to bring free English to our kids. At the time, the Internet was our jurisdictional hook. My idea was that if I had kids signed up on our online program at LHS, I could then send out teachers, in person, so that nobody had to pay for English anymore.
The R”Ys and Gedolim gave me guidelines. I could do this with girls’ schools, boys’ yeshivas outside the techum, non-mainstream boys’ yeshivas and with individual boys whose parents requested an English education.
I had to overcome the use of the Internet.
In January, I found a company that could provide all of LHS courses in a server without connection to the Internet. The menahalim of several girls’ school were interested, as their students already connected to non-internet servers in their schools.
This is still a possibility.
There is not a single jewish school in town that offers internet, so sadly, this is not applicable
throw out the internet
its all trash !
I have a proposal from Aventa Inc. dated March 13, 2012 for “a client/server model that does not rely on internet connectivity, but does require internal network connectivity. As long as students have network connectivity to the server then they can access lessons through the installed client.”
This is not the only way, and the distance model is not the only solution to the tuition, state funding and educational opportunity problems, but we have not even explored this yet.
We can and will solve
Mr. Lang, you keep promoting your idea which I’m still unclear about.Are you suggesting that we replace our teachers with computers and save money? Please explain.
Mr. Lang is correct in suggesting we should explore these solutions, which take advantage of the technology in a beneficial way while eliminating all of the risks. What he is proposing is possible to implement in a few ways. It will not be free, but it can be accomplished.
BTW I want to reiterate what I wrote in the opening, ” While I don’t personally agree with all of them, I certainly think a lot of issues are raised which certainly need to be thought about. I put them forth here mainly to have a forum through your comments regarding this very controversial subject in our community.” These are not my opinions, but talking points for comments and opinions from TLS readers who come from all of Lakewood’s diverse community and beyond.
No. I want to save teacher jobs and provide new ones. I want to make LHS the most desirable school to teach at in the state.
Lakewood children cannot physically attend our plant because of religious reasons. Parent pay thousands of dollars a year for religious education, but most children have little or no opportunity for general education.
For nine years, I studied what we can do at LHS to help the citizens of Lakewood. The disconnect was alarming. The people with the professional knowledge and power to save our district had nothing to do with our citizens. It was as if we were in an island isolated from our public.
I waited and waited for us to get an online program so that we could bring courses to the children. I want to eliminate the online element and replace it with old fashion off-line servers, because Internet is repugnant to many members of our community.
I researched for over a year the constitutionality of this, looked for citations in the administrative code, found court documents allowing transferring religious credit into a diploma, and wrote numerous papers when I studied educational administration, and law at Rutgers law school, and will not quit until our kids get justice. Only then will everyone in town be a stakeholder.
Mr. Lang, if you or some like minded community members can take the activist/advocate lead I volunteer technical expertise for system design, network architecture, implementation, security, etc.