Dowling won't allow unsupervised searches. That's an invitation to trouble. Lee Keller, Roosevelt's technology coordinator, has a two-second rule. If the student finds his way to an objectionable site by accident, he must click on the school's Web site within two seconds or he gets reprimanded. Keller still advocates the library as the best tool for term papers until the Internet becomes more kid-friendly.
Many Web sites are too complicated.
At Roosevelt, students can access the Encyclopedia Britannica on line, which Dowling thinks is a good source for middle-school kids, whose term papers are usually about two pages long. I went to the Smithsonian's Web site the other night. There wasn' t anything there I could use. On-line services such as America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy also have their own search engines. All of them do the same thing - cruise the Net with a purpose.