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Homework Time…and How the Web Can Help
With the summer season coming to a close and the 2004-2005 school year nearly underway, months of vacation will soon give way to school days and homework for students across Michigan.
Many of today's parents remember carefully searching through encyclopedias and flipping through musty card catalogs to research projects and write reports. Today, students have the added benefit of the World Wide Web at their disposal. When used in the proper context, the Internet can make research an efficient and thorough process.
Sara Bouwkamp, a 10th and 12th grade English teacher at Forest Hills Northern High School in Grand Rapids, considers the Internet an excellent research tool that puts an enormous amount of information at students' fingertips.
"We actually require our tenth-graders to use several Internet sources on their annual research papers," Bouwkamp said. "Having students use the Internet in addition to other sources, such as books, articles, and personal interviews teaches them how to think critically, by cross-referencing and forming their own opinions based on the wide range of information available."
Because the Web is both accessible and user-friendly, information can be found quickly and conveniently on just about any topic. However, Bouwkamp says Internet research can also prove to be problematic for young students who do not yet understand the lack of an editorial process for posting information on the Internet.
"Students tend to believe everything they read, which presents its own set of challenges because information on the web cannot always be taken at face value," Bouwkamp said. "Unfortunately, the Internet can also make the option of plagiarism more tempting, because it provides students with 'gimme' information they can easily pass off as their own work."
For this reason, many schools institute and enforce severe consequences for plagiarism. For some schools, this means installing plagiarism-detection software. Other teachers simply recognize when students suddenly turn in a paper written in a different style than usual, with words or sentence structures uncharacteristic of their normal work.
With all of this in mind, Iserv recommends following a few simple steps to position the Internet as a useful educational tool for your child and avoid the most common pitfalls it can present:
- Keep the family computer in a centralized location, such as a family room, where research and homework can be done under parental supervision.
- Insist your children use the Internet in conjunction with other resources, not as a stand-alone source of information.
- Require that they show evidence of their process, including drafts, notes, revisions, materials found and rejected, and sources cited.
- When your child uses the Internet to research a project, require double the sources they would use for library research. This encourages the student to use different sites to determine different viewpoints, confirm facts, and compensate for the inevitable bias that may taint Web information.
Remember, the Internet can be a successful educational tool for research however, it can be useless and even detrimental when abused. As always, Iserv stands firm that the most important way for children to safely use the Internet is under the careful supervision of a parent or guardian, or by using parental control software such as iGuard.
Top 10 Viruses and Hoaxes
The top ten viruses in July, 2004 were as follows:
| 1. | W32/Zafi-B | 59.2% |
| 2. | W32/Netsky-P | 15.8% |
| 3. | W32/Netsky-D | 4.5% |
| 4. | W32/Bagle-AA | 3.3% |
| 5. | W32/Netsky-Z | 2.9% |
| 6. | W32/Netsky-B | 2.9% |
| 7. | W32/Netsky-Q | 1.9% |
| 8. | W32/MyDoom-O | 1.7% |
| 9. | W32/Mimail-C | 1.5% |
| 10. | W32/Bagle-Zip | 0.9% |
| Others | 5.4% |
"The Zafi worm, which can arrive in several different languages, won't be disappearing anytime soon. There are so many copies of Zafi-B flying around and trying to break through companies' defenses," said Carole Theriault, security consultant at Sophos, Inc. "It is vital that computer users around the world are protected fully to ensure worms like these don't hang around like a bad smell."
"MyDoom-O, first seen on 26 July, has also been spreading successfully, needing only a few days to burst into the Sophos chart of top ten viruses. It used an unprecedented technique of infecting computers, scooping up email addresses and polling search engines for more addresses to bombard. MyDoom-O hit Google particularly hard, and millions of users were unable to access the search engine," continued Theriault.
The top ten hoaxes for July are as follows:
| 1. | Hotmail hoax | 16.0% |
| 2. | Meninas da Playboy | 11.8% |
| 3. | Bonsai kitten | 6.6% |
| 4. | WTC Survivor | 6.4% |
| 5. | A virtual card for you | 5.7% |
| 6. | Budweiser frogs screensaver | 3.7% |
| 7. | Spunkball | 3.5% |
| 8. | Bill Gates fortune | 3.3% |
| 9. | JDBGMGR | 2.9% |
| 10. | Jamie Bulger | 1.2% |
| Others | 39.0% |
"The Hotmail hoax returns to the top spot this month as we continue to see the same hoaxes causing problems month after month," continued Theriault. "Administrators are advised to set up a company policy telling all users not to forward hoaxes to friends or colleagues."
Source: Sophos.com
New Windows XP Security Upgrade Set For Release In August
There's lots of buzz going around about the upcoming release of Microsoft's security update for Windows XP called Service Pack 2 (SP2). Delays in its scheduled release due to software improvements have only added to the anticipation.
SP2 comes in response to the deluge of viruses that have hit the Internet over the past couple years. The security upgrade promises a host of features to combat the problem:
- A security center that keeps users informed of updates or opportunities to improve security.
- Automatic firewall protection to effectively block Web browser pop-ups and other intrusions.
- More detailed information concerning what programs are trying to contact your computer.
- Other upgrades besides those for security purposes including; enhanced wireless networking infrastructure and the latest Media Center edition.
SP2 will be available for free on Microsoft's website or CD upon request.
Even though this upgrade will increase security, experts caution that you will still need to be vigilant. If the warnings are ignored and an infected document is opened, you can waste a lot of time and energy fixing a preventable problem. Overall, the SP2 promises to be a tougher weapon against dangerous virus attacks. This is good news for all of us!
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