The little red school house and the Internet

By Ellen Messmer, NetworkWorld.com, 06/28/04

High school and grade school students have access to the Internet in many districts these days, but a survey of 200 technology managers at schools in 41 states makes it sound as though there's a lot fooling around instead of learning going on via the Web.

According to the study by JAS Market Research completed just this month, 59% of the school technology administrators polled acknowledge that they have reported incidents of students accessing inappropriate content.

Forty-five percent of these administrators reported students accessing online games; 39% turned students in for accessing pornography; and 25% said students access violent content. 13% even said students visit hate sites.

Altogether, 48% of the technology managers estimated their students spend more than two hours per week on the Internet during school hours.

The survey was commissioned by St. Bernard Software, which makes the iPrism Web-filtering appliance. Schools are often using many of the same Web-filtering products that businesses use these days.

School IT staffers say they do have their hands full keeping students from straying into the darker alleys of the Internet - and keeping the Internet's darker side from invading the schools.

Dan Scott, senior systems administrator at the Round Rock, Texas school district, manages a high-speed network that serves 43 K-12 school campuses. About 17,000 PCs, mainly used by students, access the systems-wide network to gain access to the Internet. He uses an intrusion-detection system (IDS) from Mirage Networks to look for ping sweeps and worm activity inside the network.

When problems pop up that appear to be emanating from a student's computer -which means it might be infected with a worm or other malware -- the Mirage Networks appliance can shut the computer off from the network.

Scott says the problem of student's seeking out inappropriate Web sites is a big one.

"It's everything from porn to hacker research," says Scott. The school district uses monitoring and intrusion-detection tools to stop student network misuse. The schools also strive to make it clear to students what "acceptable use" of the Internet is. To that end, students have to sign acceptable-use policies detailing how they should be using the Internet-and how they should not.

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