Part I: Urbana District #116 Acceptable Use Policy- Evaluation

The AUP for Urbana District #116 was written in 1995 by the District Technology Committee after a web search for examples. The AUP was sent to the Program

Council and the district legal counsel before it was sent to the school board for approval. Presently, an AUP permission form is signed only once and continues with a student for as long as the student attends Urbana #116 schools.

Our plan begins with a description of the electronic resources available to students through the district, a warning about possible dangers, and a statement of the benefits of students access. These services include e-mail, internet access and the possibility of building server accounts.

The plan then outlines our district internet and e-mail rules in detail and warns that violations may result in a loss of access as well as other disciplinary or legal action.

The second side has a list of "Top Five Things to Know Prior to Using the Internet" that teachers will share with students and a tear off "User Agreement and Parent Permission Form" which must be signed by the student and a parent or guardian.

We compared our AUP to several others including the Brevard County School District in Florida and the guidelines contained in "Acceptable Use Policies" on theclassroom CONNECT web site (http://www.classroom.net/resource/aup.html).

The classroomCONNECT site guidelines are all thoroughly covered in our plan. Our plan is very concise and parent friendly, the BCS plan is slightly over four pages and we feel that many parents would just look at it and think "where do I sign?"without reading all the text. The BCS plan is very specific about the resources available on the Internet as if they are trying to sell the idea of student use to parents. We feel that this is unnecessary. We found nothing covered in the BCS plan that we didn't cover in a more concise way in ours.

Part II: District Site Licenses

The District Technology Committee has agreed upon a number of software packages of which we have bought licenses for. Due to the extreme cost of site licences for districts, we found it much cheaper to purchase many of these products on a per machine basis. The only software packages that we have purchased across the district for every instructional Macintosh, include

FoolProof 3.0 - This is a desktop security program

Claris Works - This is a suite of productivity applications, including a word processor, spreadsheet, database, paint and draw program.

Buildings have been purchasing site licenses on their own for building specific programs including KidPix, Green Globs, Geometer's Sketchpad, etc.