Peter Griffin: Net monitoring makes life tough for the Darryls

I can still remember him now. My old primary school mate Darryl, searching the classrooms for a black-ink pen so he could change the well-deserved "D" on his report card into a fraudulent "B".

Darryl didn't like hard work and he wasn't that smart. He was the kid who used to put his lunchbox down on the urinal while he relieved himself. He was also a bully, so if you had the black-ink pen in your pencil case, you handed it over.

He'd be toast if he was at school today. His grades would be posted online, untampered with, for his parents to see.

That's if his folks had the inclination to check up on him online. I suspect in Darryl's case the parents knew the wonky "B" was his creation, but couldn't deal with the fact their kid was consistently failing.

Still, the type of student monitoring system being introduced by Auckland's Avondale College to keep the Darryls of this world in line is already in use in thousands of schools in the United States and Europe.

In the same way web services are helping to make factories run more efficiently and people like you and me better organise our lives, they're also being used to pull up the socks of a generation of school kids.

In the US, which is a world-leader when it comes to online education, internet monitoring emerged a few years ago, largely to combat report card tampering.

And we're not just talking about making Ds look like Bs. American kids have been getting creative in the school computer lab using computer scanners and Photoshop software to generate their own forged report cards. In the cut-and-paste world of the internet they can copy official school letterheads and insignias and print high-quality, double-sided report cards on cheap printers.

It's enough to fool many parents, or at least buy students some time until parent-teacher interviews roll by.

Many report cards from US schools are now issued on tamper-proof paper with seals that are near impossible to forge - like concert tickets or bank notes.

Loveland, Ohio-based Scrip Safe even specialises in making the tamper-proof paper for educational institutions.

Not surprisingly, there's good business to be had in offering monitoring services to schools. Chicago-based Edline is one of the larger providers, hosting student monitoring websites for schools across the country. Printed report cards are still sent out to parents but everything contained within them is available online.

Edline-subscribing schools post the grades of students for parents to see as well as attendance records, assignment materials and a school year calendar.

The portal is fairly simple in design and can be accessed over a dial-up internet connection. The service has about the same level of password as an internet webmail account.

Password-protection is pretty robust, but school IT departments implementing similar systems here shouldn't be left the task of storing and securing school database information. I can see a Government tender going out in the next couple of years for a Edline-type student monitoring service.

That's the proper way to do it anyway and I'm sure the demand is there.

Back in the US, where invasions of privacy are quickly met with class-action lawsuits, the internet monitoring is going even further. At Marietta Middle School in Georgia, there's a web-based school lunch monitoring system so parents know down to the calorie what their kids are eating.

The service is part of the mealpay.com system for school catering and is being encouraged by the US Government, which is faced with the fact that up to 30 per cent of school kids are overweight or obese. Parents pre-pay online for their children's lunches and can see an electronic receipt of exactly what they chose off the school grub menu.

Now classroom web logs are being used to update busy parents on what their kids have been getting up to during the school week. Canadian middle-school teacher Clarence Fisher (classblogmeister.com) has all of his students blogging, and with many good free blogging software programs available, such services are easy to get running.

These internet-based educational services are driven by parents and teachers, but the children they concern are already big internet users.

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 87 per cent of US children aged 12 to 17 use the internet, compared with 66 per cent of adults. About 48 per cent of bloggers are under 30.

The internet monitoring systems have a lot to offer and will hopefully keep teachers on the ball as well.

I'm still mad at my teachers for giving the once-over-lightly treatment to the not insignificant subject of English grammar. Lots of other people who went to school in the late 1980s and early 1990s also complain about flaky grammar education. If our parents had picked that up at the time through some monitoring system, I'm sure we'd all be better off for it. Even my old schoolmate Darryl.