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Sender: American Memory Fellows <AMFELLOWS@RS8.LOC.GOV>
Poster: Judy Drummond <jdrummo@MUSE.SFUSD.K12.CA.US>
Subject: Re: Best practices
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I would like to add my two cents here. Cathy Johnson and I started talking
about American Memory when school began in August, but were unable to get
hook-ups until February, but I asked students who had computers at home to
begin learning how to access American Memory and browsing the collections.
I also spoke about our projects at Open House and many parents were very
excited and have browsed through the collections themselves.
Well, I just had a parent conference with one family who said their son
told them he had homework on the Web every night and spent hours "chatting"
with friends. The conference was,of course, held because Jeremy was not
completing his home assignments. Duh... When questioned, Jeremy confessed
he was chatting with new friends he made on the web, and yes, a lot of the
discussions revolved around sex and violence. The parents were very
shocked and, of course, wanted to blame me. We had a lovely discussion
about their role in knowing what their child was doing on the computer, and
about how there were no such assignments written on the homework logs they
are supposed to sign every night. It could have turned out very
differently.
San Francisco Unified recently sent a letter to all students and parents
about the need for parents to monitor their children on the web. The
problem was it was too wordy, too much legal lingo, and I'm sure no one
read it. I'm trying to redo it to make it more understandable to our
population. This is a major problem.
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