Send your message in opposition to DOPA by going to the US Senate website and locate your senator with the Find Your Senators dropdown menu in the upper right corner of the page.
This is my letter to Lisa Murkowski. Feel free to model yours after this one. I used Vicki Davis’ blog post and Chistopher Harris’ wiki page as information resources.
Dear Senator Murkowski,
I am a teacher from Fairbanks, and I am asking that you vote in opposition to The Deleting Online Predators Act (HR. 5319), a bill that was recently approved by the House of Representatives. This bill is overbroad and will have a stifling effect on schools and libraries at a time when we need to expand our students’ horizons rather than narrow them.
I am a 23-year veteran Alaska teacher with an MEd in Language and Literacy, and a K-12 Alaska State Reading Endorsement. I am committed to literacy education for all students in our state, and I feel strongly that we need appropriate Internet resources in our schools and libraries for students to become proficient in the new literacies of the 21st century.
Although the DOPA bill is well intentioned, it will fail to achieve its stated purpose. The bill prohibits school and library access to “commercial Web sites that let users create public ‘Web pages or profiles’ and also offer a discussion board, chat room, or e-mail service.” Schools currently have acceptable use policies. And sites such as MySpace, Xanga, and Facebook are already blocked from school servers. Students will nonetheless continue to access these social networking sites after school from home where there may be NO adult supervision. Students should be educated about privacy and online safety the same as they are about personal and public safety with Health and Driver Education. Our best hope of teaching students about responsible Internet use is in our classrooms.
Educational websites could also be unnecessarily blocked for teachers with legitimate instructional goals. Students may no longer be able to do collaborative research on wikis, or to publish their stories in weblogs. Real-time communication with scientists such as in the Jason Project might also be restricted.
Our congressional representatives surely don’t intend to obstruct legitimate educational processes. A better solution to the problem of online safety for minors would be to encourage schools to develop curriculum for education on this very important issue.
Senator Murkowski, I know that you are a supporter of public education, and that you are an advocate for children. The Deleting Online Predators Act neither supports education nor protects children. Please oppose or offer an amendment to this legislation so that we might continue to use appropriate web resources in our schools and libraries. Our goal is to protect the safety as well as the educational opportunities of students.
Sincerely,
Doug Noon
One thing about Alaska, we are all neighbors in a way that you don’t feel in other more populous areas. I’m curious to see how Lisa responds.
7 Comments
GReat letter!
Thanks for a great leter Doug. It was easy to personalize it and send it to my Senators.
Please check these words: well intentioned, nonetheless, supervision, Internet
Thanks,
jb
John, thank you for your alertness to my spelling errors. Of all the times to neglect the spell checker…you might not know that I’m a spelling neurotic. It doesn’t matter except that people are using it as an example. I hope they had more sense than I and checked themselves. it’s fixed now. No telling how many senators will receive similar letters from folks who seem not to know that nonetheless has none in it, supervision has an r, and amend has only 1 m. I don’t know if the dash between well and intentioned is wrong, or that internet needs to be capitalized, but since you took the initiative to set me right, I’m going along with your spelling book.
I bookmarked the link to your class blogs in my classroom blogs files. Nice work with your website.
I especially like the section on encouraging schools to develop curriculum on this issue.
If you’re looking for more solid points to include, see
Larry Magid’s column today on the CBS News site. It’s an excellent critique of the law from someone who understands Internet safety issues inside out.
I am a school district library media coordinator in Colorado. Here is what I sent to our senators – with a subject line of “vote no on DOPA”:
Please consider carefully the restrictions that DOPA will place on a school’s ability to teach students how to be safe on the Internet. Completely removing access to social networking sites in schools will do little to deter students from accessing this information outside of school or even in schools as the knowledge of how to bypass filters seems to flow easily through the students.
This new mode of communication and socialization is here to stay – and students have embraced it. Imagine a world in which playgrounds were chained up and students were forbidden to enter – due to the probability that a predator would find them there and hurt someone –or because students would not refrain from bullying each other. It is inconceivable that the public would accept this solution. Instead, we turn to character education and safety instruction such as “don’t talk to strangers” to help our students understand the boundaries that exist for their own protection. We monitor this recreational space in schools, and when we observe inappropriate behavior, we can intervene and teach the students about the consequences of their behavior. We must do the same for the cybercommunity –a place where our students will spend a large amount of their time outside of school –unsupervised – if the survey data is correct.
If access is blocked at schools, than educators will not have the ability to teach students safe and ethical use within these social networking sites. Additionally, some excellent educational opportunities for global communication (21st century learning initiative) and sharing via blogs and other social networking sites will be shut down. We will not have the ability to teach students using “real world” situations because we will have to forbid them to enter the “real world” – their real world.
Nancy,
Thanks for your contribution. I hope those senators are listening.
This letter template is not only well wriiten but educational as well. I am a veteran 4th grade teacher and I have and eleven year old daughter. I must admit that my fear of the “web” and communication via the internet has left me in the dark. My students and my daughter know more about the computer peering and sharing then I do. I find myself learning from them.
Which leads me to the educational aspect of blocking certain sites. Dooes this teach our students anything other than to hide their knowledge from us. I m in agreement that we need to teah students to use the web safely so that predators hae a difficult time reaching them, but as teachers we need to learn safety and the many uses of the web as a teaching tool, too.
I have finally enrolled into a technology into education course of study. My district is not going to teach me these things, so I need to be proactive and learn on my own.
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