Internet Safety with Portaportal.com

The students sauntered in to the computer lab chatting, went to their computers, and sat down. The teacher quickly spouted her directions. "OK. Voices should be off. We don't have much time here. Go to Portaportal, type in my name, then go to Social Studies, and then History Alive."

Any idea what that means? It means the teacher is helping the class to use the internet safely, as well as using the class' limited amount of computer time wisely.

Computer technology, including use of the World Wide Web, is now a crucial part of a child's education, beginning as early as kindergarten. Students progress from learning to use the mouse, to keyboarding, to researching topics on the web.

But as we know, the web isn't always a safe place for children. While searching for information about the human body, they can easily stumble into porn sites. Or, if unsupervised while using the internet, they can wander into chat rooms, where they may encounter sexual predators.

Schools do have safety policies and procedures for students who are using the internet. In the school where I work, students must be supervised while using the internet, and must have a specific purpose for being on the internet. Random searching is not allowed. Chat rooms, e-mail, and instant messaging are not allowed. Games are OK only during indoor recess or special "free times" authorized by teachers, and game websites are pre-selected for students to use during these times.

When it comes to research and other online activities, the teachers often look up sites ahead of time, rather than having the students search on their own. This keeps the students on pre-screened, safe sites, and also saves time for the students.

Portaportal provides a place for each teacher to save his or her links, so that any student can access them during computer time, or even at home. It's a free service, and anyone can use it to save bookmarks, although it's particularly well suited to teaching.

A teacher simply creates an account at www.portaportal.com, and then creates links to the sites he or she wants students to be able to access (or links that he or she would like to personally use). The links can be categorized by subject matter as well.

Students can then use any computer to go to the Portaportal login page, and log in as guests using the teacher's name. They will see the entire list of links that the teacher has provided for their use, and can simply click the links. A Google search box is also provided on the page if needed, although most of our teachers have linked to Yahoo Kids!, and we use that for searching instead.

The site's design is purely utilitarian; it's not fancy, or even particularly attractive in appearance, although users can change the color scheme used for their pages. That's fine for our purposes - we're not running a business through the website, just getting some information to the students.

Portaportal has been a trouble-free and effective resource for teachers and students at our school, and has helped us to maximize our use of technology for education. Any teacher or school could easily implement the use of this website. Users can sign up for a free account at http://www.portaportal.com.