Imagine that you and your class are about to embark on a school trip to a huge and exciting city. You, and they, are almost overwhelmed at the thought of the treats that await you there: museums of every kind, shops, art galleries, theatres, play parks, sporting venues, restaurants, picturesque quarters where a world of different cultures can be observed. At the same time however, you feel a little apprehensive at the idea of your young charges cast loose in this vast metropolis. Some of the sights will be educational but sobering – the children will require preparation for those. And then there will be the no-go areas – the mean streets and dark alleys that should be avoided.

Safe surfing
Much the same prospect faces a primary school which is about to connect to the amazing world of the internet and one of its most popular features – the World Wide Web. The mixed feelings are similar, and so are the measures the adults have to take if children are to reap the rewards without suffering any unpleasant consequences. First of all, it is essential that the adults know how to find their way around. They should know their browsers from their search engines, and use with confidence the various methods of skipping from site to site. Initial IT training is important, but plenty of practice thereafter is essential.

The second prerequisite for successful use of the World Wide Web is safety – how to keep children away from the dark alleys where pornography, violence, drug abuse, bad language, hate and exploitation are to be found. There are several different approaches to doing this.

Word blockers
The crudest method is to filter out material when certain key words are used. For example, the search engine AltaVista can either highlight or exclude Web pages containing particular words. This approach is clearly something of a blunt instrument. Filtering out anything containing the word ‘sex’, for instance, could have the effect of ruling out documents containing statistics relating to gender. And if the service was very basic, field references to the counties of Essex and Sussex, not to mention this very article, would be excluded.

Censored sites
A more sophisticated service is offered by blocking software from companies such as CyberPatrol, NetNanny or CyberSitter. Of these services, CyberPatrol (http://www.cyberpatrol.com/) is the most extensive. Owned by the toy company Mattel, it uses teams of parents and educators to build its massive lists of inappropriate sites. If a dodgy site gets through, users can report it to CyberPatrol, and they will add it to their CyberNOT database. Unfortunately, this useful feature of the service also reveals its Achilles heel – however diligently such organisations search for the undesirable, and however frequently they update their lists, inappropriate sites are still going to be encountered occasionally.

Premier choice
One way of avoiding this problem is to select ‘good’ sites instead of blocking ‘bad’ ones, or, to put it another way, block out everything unless it is specifically unlocked. This is known as the white list approach. The BrowserLock (http://www.browserlock.com/) system is a good example. This service allows users to create personal maps of the internet that can only be modified by a password holder. You can, says the company, add sites easily, vary security levels and override the block completely for free surfing. As well as ruling out the possibility of children happening upon unpleasant sites, this facility enables teachers to design their own website libraries.

On disc
An even more narrowly focused approach to the information superhighway is offered by internet-based CD-ROMs. These are useful as tasters for Net neophytes, time savers for hard-pressed teachers, or short cuts for schools where access to the internet is limited. The titles typically contain a range of materials on a given subject downloaded from the internet, relevant sites to visit online, and teacher resources such as lesson plans. Pupils move around the programme's limited area as if they were moving around the World Wide Web, so the experience is also useful as a dry run. SCET and Apte are two companies to offer this type of product.

Specialist sites
Back on the internet itself, the number of specialised children’s sites such as @Kidz (http://www.atkidz.com/) and @School (http://www.atschool.co.uk/) is growing all the time. @Kidz is currently offering £1 to primary schools for every child who takes a CD-ROM and registers with the service. @School is offering its service free for the summer term and lifelong free access if enough children register at a particular school.

Contacts
SCET – Tel: 0141 337 5000
(http://www.scet.com/)
E-mail: enquiries@scet.com

Apte (http://www.apte.com/)
E-mail: male@apte.com