We strongly encourage you to work as a family to set ground rules for the care, maintenance, and use of the laptops. Families should have set work routines that allow for completion of homework tasks separately from play or socializing on the computer. Given the safety and family concerns of some internet content, we strongly suggest students use laptops in such a way to provide family members a direct line of sight to laptop screens and have on-going family discussions about appropriate Internet use. Also, parents should have access to passwords for their children’s accounts online. Families can also help by encouraging students to have only one program open at a time in order to engage more completely with one task. We also strongly encourage families to set ground rules about the use of chat programs or other social networking programs while students are working on their laptops at home. In fact, for middle school students, we generally encourage disabling or turning off chat programs while students are completing work for school.