Cincinnati, OH, March 20, 2008 – A top 50 national ranking of school districts, indicating which districts keep students safest when searching on the Internet, was released today. Forsyth County School District in suburban Atlanta finished first, with nearly 6 million safe searches for the 2006-2007 school year.
The Educational Safe Search Index was administered by Thinkronize (http://ntdi.nettrekker.com/index.php?page=top50), a leader in the digital delivery of K-12 educational content and developers of netTrekker d.i., the #1 safe educational search engine. netTrekker d.i. is now used by over 11 million students, 600,000 teachers and 20,000 schools in all 50 states in the United States.
Schools are increasingly seeking ways to keep students Web-safe while, at the same time, helping them achieve. netTrekker d.i.’s solution offers a "humans-plus-tech" approach—a search engine built from the ground up by a hundreds-strong team of educators who have eliminated links to any pornographic, offensive, useless or commercial sites. The key: going back to basics by having educators hand-pick only academically relevant, standards-aligned sites and marrying that human review to potent proprietary technology that scrubs the entire Web for what kids don't need to see. The end result: students stay on task and stay focused on the content they’re learning.
“We congratulate and thank Forsyth County School District—and all of our top 50 school districts—for stepping up and providing kids with safe, relevant digital content,” said Thinkronize CEO Randy Wilhelm. “Using regular search engines means sifting through thousands of non-educational and sometimes inappropriate Web sites. We are proud to deliver a solution that is helping educators make significant headway in turning things around so that every child can benefit from valuable online content, delivered at his or her individual learning level.”
Forsyth County School District will be awarded with the equivalent of a $5000 prize package, including two days of professional development/integration workshops, two Webinars and assorted netTrekker d.i. premium items.
According to Forsyth County School District Director of Instructional Technology Jill Hobson, “We saw a need to provide a safe and reliable search tool for our elementary, middle and high school students. netTrekker d.i. is the homepage for the Web browser on the more than 13,000 computers throughout the Forsyth County school system.” Hobson continued, “Implementing netTrekker d.i. began with training for each of our instructional technology specialists, who redelivered training to teachers. In order to support a standards-based approach to designing quality units of instruction, we also found netTrekker d.i. to be a very valuable tool for our teachers.”
The number of safe searches by district ranged from over 560,000 searches a year to nearly 6 million (top user). School districts in the top ten:
1. Forsyth County School District, GA
2. Sacramento City Unified School District, CA
3. Ysleta Independent School District, TX
4. El Paso Independent School District, TX
5. Orange County Public Schools, FL
6. Fort Bend Independent School District, TX
7. Stockton Unified School District, CA
8. Atlanta Public Schools, GA
9. Cobb County School District, GA
10. Davis School District, UT
Thinkronize will release the national ranking for the 2007-2008 school year, broken out by small-, medium- and large-sized districts, in the fall of 2008.
