Online+Safety+and+Monitoring

Before starting the online science fair, have a conversation with students about their responsibilities when using technology and a wiki. The guidelines should mirror your schools technology use agreement. Emphasize the point that this is a school community site and whatever they do reflects on them and their entire community. This is also a good time to remind them that they should not have any communications with "strangers" and that only students and teachers should have access to the wiki.
 * Online Responsibilities**

When setting up their account, students **must** go into the "My Account" tab, scroll down to "Settings" and **select to "Allow Priate Messages From ...Other members of wikis that I belong to"** //(as shown below)// =↓=



Have a system or protocol for student usernames. We found it best to use students first names followed by an underscore and the intitials of their teacher. For example John Smith in Ms. White's class would have the username john_MW. When students set up their page they should again follow a protocol. They could use their first name and the team that they are on. For example John Smith on team 3 would name his page john_T3. Having this formating of usernames and page names will make it much easier to organize and track student work.
 * Student Account Usernames and Page Naming**

When setting up your wiki and teacher account, go into the My Account tab and scroll down to Settings where you may select to receive email notifications of changes to pages that you are monitoring. This is one way to know any time a student changes their page so you can do spot checks and monitor the content of pages. You may also wish to spot check students' discussion tab messages and email inboxes. A little bit of obvious supervision goes a long way in how students treat their wiki communications with each other.
 * Monitoring changes, discussion, and email**