Part I:
Urbana District #116 Acceptable Use Policy- Evaluation
The AUP for Urbana District #116 was written in 1995 by the District Tehcnology 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 the classroom
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 didnŐt cover in a more concise way in ours.
One issue not covered in our plan that we will have to address for the next
school year is student use of chat spaces on the web. This has only recently
become a problem with the new web browsers. Informally, we all believe that
the rule should simply be NO CHATS. However, this will have to be formally
proposed to the District Technology Committee, then the Program Council and
finally the School Board.
Part II:
All of the listed programs are for student use.
An addition, ClarisWorks 5.0 and FoolProof is installed on every Macintosh
computer in the district and it is a District requirement that both be purchased
for each new machine.
Return to ePortfolio.
Prepared by Sue Bogren, Kevin Erlinger, Jan Hari and Pam Van Walleghen
Urbana Middle School
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