Protecting Our Kids Online

When I was 11, my older cousins became my sitters. Whenever my mom had to work overtime, or late into the night, I would stay over at their house and the time was spent online. One of my favorite things to do would be to watch them go online, log into Myspace, and spend hours creating their profile pages, selecting their top friends, and playing games the site offered. Soon enough, they offered to make me my own account. I was obviously not 13 at the time, but we just changed my birth year from 1997 to 1990. Simple. Pretty much everyone in my 5th-grade class was doing the same by the time this happened. I was just the one that joined late. Danah Boyd stated, "on the internet, every child is 14." I honestly think every child on the internet is at least 18, if not older.

CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act) is meant to "protect students from online predation, cyberbullying, and inappropriate content." Filters are applied and vary depending on the student's grade level. Under COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), children under the age of 13 cannot submit personal information about themselves through internet services without parental consent. A detailed look at both CIPA and COPPA can be found here. Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) that a school district provides do protect the district itself agreeing to the sites they can use and how they can use the internet using those devices. When 54% of teens admit that they talk with strangers online and 30% have actually met up with those strangers, of course, policies will be put in place for the children (insert WandaVision reference here). 

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I'm a Civics teacher so naturally, I love policies. Tom Hanks said it in the 1993 film Philadelphia, "I love the law." I think CIPA and COPPA are policies that needed to happen in order to protect children. Children themselves are a vulnerable group that is not legally allowed to give consent to interactions that take place online. In terms of age, I do think more should be done for those who are older than 13. In my example I gave earlier I was 11 years old, but I know that I was still participating in sketchy things online through the age of 18. Again, consent is not something a vulnerable population group, children, in this case, can give. You don't become an adult at 13, so I do think there is more we can do for those from 13 to 17.

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However, I have a really difficult time policing my students when they are in my classroom. A very difficult time. Related to this topic specifically, I don't like to, nor do I or will I, monitor the behavior of my students when they are online on their own devices. So when this video mentions that I should "ALWAYS supervise students when using the internet at school, even if it's a student's device," I have to push back against this. I already have the internal struggle of using LanSchool, a program for teachers to view the student's school-issued laptop screen, so I can't even picture myself hovering over a kid's personal phone to see what they're doing. While I know it's something that inherently protects children, it's still something I have a hard time understanding if it's something we should do.

To me, the best way to truly resist this is through education. We should be learning alongside our kids best practices on navigating the internet, why these policies exist in the first place, and why their privacy is so necessary to protect and maintain over time. If we tell our students, "don't do this," without explaining or exploring the "why" behind it, an entire message is lost.