Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: GPS Technology Helps Parents Track Teens, 2/19/07
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june07/gps_2-19.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What is privacy?

2. What are some ways privacy and safety conflict?

3. What is GPS technology? How is it used?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What is GPS technology?

Global Positioning System (GPS) technology has been around since 1978. There are many military applications for the system, which relies on approximately 30 orbiting satellites maintained by the U.S. Air Force, but increasingly, civilians are using it to predict weather, plot directions and track one another.

2. How is GPS technology used to track teen driving?

One of the most popular applications of GPS technology for parents has been a small box that is plugged into a car dashboard, allowing them to remotely download data, including the car's location and speed, from the box onto their computer.

In fact, some of these devices automatically email or call parents when their child is speeding or has entered a location previously designated as off limits. In some cases, parents can remotely sound an alarm, honk the horn or flash a light when their teen is driving too fast.

3. Why do parents like cell phones with GPS technology?

GPS tracking of cell phones is also popular with parents who want to know where their children are. Parents can sign up for services such as Sprint Family Locator, Disney Mobile, and Verizon Wireless Chaperone that enable them to look up a cell phone's location online.

4. How is the Sprint service different than the others?

Sprint is the only company to inform children about their parents' activities, sending a text message to children each time their parents perform a location check.

5. What was Paige White's initial opinion about GPS tracking? What does she think now?

When teenager Paige White of Los Gatos, California learned her parents had secretly installed a GPS tracking device in her SUV she was shocked and angry.

"I was kind of mad because I felt it was an invasion of my privacy," she told the San Francisco Gate.

But now White says she likes the device. "It helps me watch my speed and keeps me honest," she told the Gate.

6. What do some psychiatrists say about tracking devices?

And some psychiatrists argue the tracking devices raise issues of trust and sometimes replace communication and dialogue.

Tracking can lead "parents to think there are technical solutions to human problems," Stephen Mintz, co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families, told the Oakland Tribune in 2006.

7. Name two situations in which GPS technology does not work.

The cell phone tracking systems don't always get reception, especially in remote areas. And, as Delly Tamer, founder of online retailer LetsTalk.com told The Dallas Morning News, the locator service "does not work if the phone is off."

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. If you were the parent of a teenager would you use the GPS tracking devices in your child's car or phone? Why or why not?

2. What is your definition of trust? What are different forms of trust? How is it different between a parent and a child? A teacher and a student? A government and a citizen?

3. Research other technologies that use satellites. What are some privacy issues these technologies raise?

Write a 300-500 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.