Privacy Policies on School Sites New Federal Trade Commission regulations called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act go into effect on April 21, 2000. These regulations will require most commercial sites to prominently display privacy statements on their sites, as well as to conform with stricter policies with regard to the information they collect from children under the age of 13. School web sites should ordinarily conform with these policies as well, even if they aren't strictly required to by the regulations, since it is considered ethical to have high standards with regard to safeguarding the privacy of students. Examples of privacy statements from a number of schools as well as a discussion of the new privacy regulations in general have been added to the School Web Clubs site. Creating animated banners and displays The clipart, banners, scripts and other fun section of the School Web Clubs site features a number of online resources that help students to create interesting graphic and informational content for their sites.
Banners can be an interesting way to help draw attention to new or important content.
Several online sites allow people to make animated banners online, and then download them for use on their own web sites. One very useful one is the Animation Online site, which uses a fairly easy form to allow anyone to create and save different styles animated displays and banners. Using this resource can be an excellent activity for beginning web designers who want to find some easy graphical content to make their pages more interesting. The School Web Clubs site has recently added a discussion of Creating a School Web Club Style Guide . Since club members who help with school web pages will change from semester to semester, it is important that decisions about how the site should look and how pages should be created are recorded and made available for training and guidance.