Staff use of school property or services should be for professional
purposes. While anyone may have emergency phone calls, personal
telephone use should be kept to a minimum.
E-mail is not secure. It never has been and never will be. Information
or expressions of a very private or personal nature should never
be placed in e-mail. Many businesses have policies that clearly
state the business is the owner of all files on their system,
e-mail and all others, and that files on the system may be inspected
at any time without prior notification. Employees should use
this position as a guideline. Be very cautous of e-mail attachments
that are executable, i.e., have suffixes of ".exe",
".com", or ".bat." These may contain viruses.
Any attachment may cause incompatibility problems if the receiver
does not have the very same version of the software with which
the attachment was created. Please do not expect the employer's
technical staff to help convert personal e-mail attachments.
Both student and staff use of the Internet should be related
to school purposes. Clearly staff members have a broader scope
of research needs than do students. Although the Internet provides
a vast resource of educationally valuable information, it also
provides many unprofessional distractions and outright offensive
and inappropriate information for k-12 schools. Some people feel
Internet filtering should be used to keep out inappropriate information.
This approach seems acceptable at first glance. However, it also
raises all of the arguments about censorship. To date, there
is no filtering system that keeps out all inappropriate material.
All current systems eliminate some valid information. From the
education point-of-view, it could be argued that one job is to
help students identify appropriate information and techniques
for avoiding inappropriate Internet sites. In the event that
either students or staff inadvertently find material with which
they feel uncomfortable or know to be inappropriate, they should
immediately click the Browser's Back Button to get away
from the offensive content. Students should be instructed to
tell a teacher so the teacher can help students avoid the offensive
site in the future.
Tips
(1) Be sure to read any school board policy regulating use of
the Internet and have parents sign any related agreement before
you let students use the Internet.
(2) Use http://planetk-12.planetsearch.com/
for safe teacher searches. Direct students to use http://www.yahooligans.com/
or http://homeworkheaven.com/
for safe student searches.
(3) Avoid attaching to the Internet between the hours of 11:00
a.m. and 1:00 p.m. to stay away from peak usage and slow response
times.
(4) Set your e-mail to check for new mail at time intervals
of 45 minutes or longer.
(5) Don't send large e-mail attachments of sound, video, or
graphics-especially don't send large files to groups of people.