CIPA: Legal protection for students' online safety

Video Transcription

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I hope you're having a wonderful day. Today, we are going to focus in on CIPA or the Children's Internet Protection Act. For today's lesson, I've chosen a quote by Nelson Mandela, which states "there can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children." And I think that as we look through these different acts that it's really important we remember that the whole reason why we have these regulations is really to keep our children safe and that ideally we are treating our children well.

By the end of today's lesson, you should be able to explain what the Children's Internet Protection Act is and to whom it applies. You should be able to explain what their requirements are for CIPA, both for schools and libraries. And you will be able to describe specific components for schools internet safety policies. First, let's take a look at what the Children's Internet Protection Act is.

The Children's Internet Protection Act was enacted by Congress in 2000. The goal of which was to address certain concerns about children's access to obscene or harmful content online. It imposes a number of requirements on certain schools or libraries, specifically those that receive discounts for internet access or various internal connections through the E-rate Program. This is a program that makes certain communication services and various products affordable to schools or libraries that are eligible under its program. The Children's Internet Prevention Act was updated in 2011 to really be expanded to the various new elements of technology, and, well, we should be teaching our students about the ways in which they can now communicate with this new technology.

Next, let's look at what the various Children's Internet Prevention Act requirements are. First and foremost, any school or library must have an internet safety policy. And this policy must involve the following elements. It needs to make sure that it blocks or filters access to obscene or harmful images. This you'll be able to see when you're in a school or library and you type in a certain website, potentially sometimes a harmless website, but it gets popped up as blocked. This means that some element of that website has been deemed harmful or obscene to children and, thus, has been blocked by this act.

Schools must hold public meetings to make sure that they address these policies. They also have to monitor various students online behaviors and make sure that teachers are teaching students about appropriate online behaviors. Next, let's take a look at what the various recruitment components are. First, various schools and libraries must make sure that their internet safety policy addresses possible access to inappropriate online content by minors. They need to assure that they have a system in place in order to protect minors from seeing that information.

It also needs to address safety and security of minors in online communications. Are we making sure that when students are using email, or chat rooms, or other forms of direct electronic communication that various safety procedures are in place so that students aren't potentially communicating with a predator? Their internet safety policy must address any potential unauthorized access or hacking by minors into unlawful online activities or websites. It also needs to address any unauthorized disclosure of personal information that a student might put out there online.

Finally, CIPA's requirements make sure that internet safety policies address any measures restricting access to harmful online content. This is making sure that they don't have any access to anything that could connect minors to harmful information. Now that we've reached the end of our lesson, you should be able to explain what the Children's Internet Protection Act is and to whom it specifically applies. You should also be able to explain what the requirements are for schools and libraries and describe the specific components for different schools internet safety policies.

Now I would like to take just a moment for reflection. Now that you've learned about CIPA and all of its requirements, what would be the first step you might take to begin implementing these requirements into your classroom teaching? Feel free to pause the video for a moment as you think about this question.

Now it's your turn to apply what you've learned in this video. The additional resources section will be helpful. This section is designed to help you discover useful ways to apply what you've learned here. Each link includes a brief description so that you can easily target the resources that you want. That's all we have for now. I hope you're having a wonderful rest of your day.