Kids' IM-ing: A teacher's view

In the past few years, Haworth Public School (K-8) in New Jersey has had assemblies and evening meetings with parents about Internet safety, but "sometimes those meetings are a little behind the times," Dr. Robert Price, the school's technology coordinator and a consultant for the makers of I.M. Control software, told me in a recent phone interview. Those meetings were about "chatting with strangers, inappropriate Web sites, filtering," he said. It's all good, but "IM is kind of outside that. You can talk to strangers in instant-messaging, I suppose, but I find kids don't want to do that. They want to talk to their friends in IM." That's just it. IM is not your typical online-safety issue. For a look at what it is, click to my newsletter this week.