The anonymity that the Internet affords potential perpetrators fosters such attitudes, believe some teachers. That message apparently got through to Jermaine Williams, a fifth grader at Carmen Arace, where kids traipse through the halls with their heavy, magnesium-cased laptops and book bags strapped to luggage carts. That's easy to understand. Harder to do is keeping track of all the rules that govern students' Internet use. Jermaine's own laptop had been confiscated for three weeks after a teacher caught him visiting an off-limits game site.
Teachers monitor students' Net activities from their own computers.
But first you have to start with external controls. The fee-based service compares student papers to millions of pages on the Internet and notifies teachers if a student has lifted other people's work. Some teachers believe the best deterrent to online crime is the fear of being caught. Angelique was amazed when she heard about a couple of teenagers who managed to hack into a computer system and shut down Internet access. But I was not impressed.