Illustration by Linzie Hunter
For baby boomers, childhood meant eight-track tapes and Happy Days on TV. For their kids, it’s iPods, text messaging and MySpace. Parents and teachers have mixed emotions: The Internet and classroom tools such as Smart Boards have broadened students’ research abilities and made learning more interactive—but each technological advance increases kids’ access to dangerous strangers and troubling content.
“My job has changed tremendously,” says Karen Davis, assistant principal at St. Joseph’s Academy. “Students are so savvy with technology, you have to stay on top of them.”
But knowing students’ whereabouts online isn’t easy. St. Joe, like many area high schools, has systems in place to monitor hits on various websites. When a certain unfamiliar site gets too many hits, it is flagged for administrative review.
This system, along with a few students who came forward with information, is what alerted the school to proxy sites—websites used by students to climb over St. Joe’s firewalls and visit unapproved sites.
A clever digital manipulation, a proxy site can be thought of as a jumping-off point: Students can log on to the proxy site and surf the Web from that IP address instead of their own, making it seem as if they never went to a forbidden site at all.
The problem is this: Browsing the Web from a proxy site’s IP address (the numeric address given to any computer connected to the Internet) may give the operator of the proxy complete access to everything on students’ computers. Not only can skillful proxy operators access personal computer files, they can also track every move users are making on their computers, including online purchases, instant-messaging conversations or any other Web activity that involves a so-called private site.
Proxy sites “leave teens wide open to identity theft and online predators,” warns Lee Theobald, an information-technology specialist for Pfingsten Publishing. “You can get information from about 85 percent of people’s computers in the blink of an eye.”
When Elizabeth Ellis, a sophomore at St. Joe, first heard about proxy sites, the idea seemed harmless—until her school held meetings in homeroom, followed by a letter to parents, informing them of the dangers.
“It scared me,” Ellis admits. “I didn’t know it was dangerous; I just thought it was something to use.” She says students haven’t been using the sites since the meeting. She’s frustrated, though, by all the restrictions her parents and teachers put on Internet use. She views her computer as a social lifeline, connecting her to countless friends at the click of a mouse. “I talk to people more on the computer than I do in person,” she says. “I didn’t think of it as a safety hazard.”
Eileen Bagy, an IT support analyst for Monsanto, does. She has seen the potential dangers of websites such as MySpace and Facebook, online services that allow users to post profiles and chat with other subscribers. “You have no idea who’s looking at your profile,” Bagy tells her 13-year-old daughter and her daughter’s friends, students in the Parkway School District. “You trust it too much.”
Kids today grow up speaking computer,
and their parents are often left far behind.
Bagy keeps the home computer locked and closely monitors her daughter’s use of programs such as AOL Instant Messenger, fondly called “AIM” by its legions of users.
Cell phones are also a challenge, because unlike landlines, they’re impossible to trace. Bagy doesn’t want her 13-year-old to have a cell phone until she has her driver’s license. “Hopefully we can hold off, but we might not be able to from a peer-pressure standpoint,” she says.
Even preteens are going digital. Katie Limbaugh-Foristal, a fifth-grade teacher at Bellerive Elementary in Creve Coeur, says that of her 21 students, 21 have computers at home, 19 have Internet access, five have cell phones and five have iPods.
Monitoring the kids’ Internet access is Limbaugh-Foristal’s main concern. The school has a firewall in place to block access to inappropriate material, but it’s not foolproof. Limbaugh-Foristal researches the subjects she wants to cover ahead of time to avoid any problems. Other teachers are beginning to realize that cell phones can be used to photograph—and later share—an exam.
Many of St. Joe’s teachers lecture from the back of the classroom instead of the front so they can be sure students are doing nothing more than taking class notes on their laptops. “Instead of passing [paper] notes, now they’re passing them on the computer,” Davis says.
They’re also mastering new skills with an ease that fascinated author Don Tapscott when he researched his book Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation. Rather than passively watching TV, he notes, kids in the digital age are reading online, analyzing and composing their own thoughts. They’re also bending new media to old purposes, “using the technology to play, learn, communicate and form relationships as children have always done.”
Ellis prefers the Internet to TV because there are so many more options: She can e-mail, “Facebook,” shop and research a paper for school simultaneously from her computer. When asked how she juggles it all, she says, “It just comes naturally; after a while, you kind of get good at it.”
Dr. Ken Haller, assistant professor of pediatrics at Saint Louis University, says it’s this innate ability that makes parents’ technology patrols so difficult. “It’s like learning a language: When you grow up with it, it’s easy to speak, but if you try to learn a language as an adult, it’s much more difficult,” he says. “Kids today grow up speaking computer, and their parents are often left far behind.”
Computer-speak comes in many forms, which doesn’t make translation any easier. Dad might think “POP” is an affectionate nickname, but, to a seasoned instant messenger, the acronym means “Parent on prowl—I can’t speak freely.” An “onion router” has nothing to do with chopping vegetables; this digital technique, similar to the proxy site, allows teens to illegally download music without being traced. But if parents hear “DDR,” they can relax: Dance Dance Revolution is merely a party game, played through Xbox or PlayStation on a smart pad that senses players’ movements, challenging them to match their dance steps to the flashing arrows on the screen.
“Everything is getting so much more advanced,” sighs Ellis. “I remember the days when the iPod was the only big thing.”
