In Our Classrooms: December 2007

Internet Safety: Web 2.0

Since Google's purchase of YouTube in October 2006, the phrase Web 2.0 has knit itself into every strand of lay media, relentlessly. What is it, and what does it mean for our kids?

The phrase Web 2.0 connotes the Internet technologies that allow you and your children to share your own Web-published content easily, and to collaborate with others in doing so. These technologies include:

• social networking sites like MySpace where you can create a Web site, share songs or movies, and comment on the sites of others
• wikis, or collaborative writing spaces, like Wikipedia
• blogs, or online diaries
• shared bookmark sites like del.icio.us
• photo sites like Flickr
• YouTube and other video-sharing sites
• and the new venues being invented daily.

Web 2.0 tools make it easy for kids to express themselves in public, and also to reveal what they shouldn't to people we wish they might never know. How should we scaffold this new experience -- make sure that the benefits outweigh the risks? That's not an easy question to answer.

Here at Pike we're exploring these tools in some classrooms. Our PE and environmental education teacher, Joan Regan, hosts a blog called Look and See that hosts pictures of wildlife seen around Pike by our infrared camera. Several classes have published podcasts during spring 2005 and spring 2006, and kindergarten podcasts will debut later this year. Ninth graders created a wiki (Web pages) to share Web-based resources for some of their projects, and to track birthdays and course deadlines. Our librarians and technology department share their bookmarks with faculty via a Web-based bookmark site called furl.

As with any educational tool (including new technology or not), we try to make sure that kids are  learning something significant that they couldn't learn otherwise. That's one way to maximize the benefits of these new tools. At school, we can minimize the risks because we're around to work with the kids whenever the tools are in use. At home, it's not so easy.

A few years ago, we worried about how instant messaging affected our kids. I still worry about that. Then came MySpace. Now, with the advent of other Web 2.0 tools, there's a whole new world of worries and possibilities. Perhaps the best words I've found on the subject are from the editors at Wired Safety (www.wiredsafety.org). They remind us that it's not possible to keep kids safe by keeping them away from these tools:


Instead, they recommend that parents gather up their courage and learn these new tools so that we can set appropriate boundaries and expectations for our kids in cyberspace just as we do in other arenas. Wired Safety is one of the Internet's pre-eminent sites for Internet safety information, and if you visit that page you'll find some very useful tools to help guide you and your kids through these new frontiers. There's no magical answer for safety, though--either here at school or at home. All any of us can do is to keep humble, keep talking to our kids about what they're doing online, and keep learning, undaunted by our ignorance and knowing that our kids fundamentally welcome our help.