Austin Public Schools are making every effort to keep students safe in the classroom, at the playground — and everywhere really, even in cyberspace.

A top 100 national ranking of school districts, indicating which districts keep students safest when searching online, named Austin Public Schools a top district.

“It is, of course, very important to keep kids safe when they go onto the Internet and that is a priority in the district,” said Corey Haugen, director of instructional technology for Austin Public Schools.

The award was given by netTrekker, an academic and safety-based search engine that the district subscribes to, Thursday.

The Top 100 Safe Search Award recognizes the 100 districts across the country that had the highest usage in netTrekker from the 2008-2009 school year. Austin had the highest usage for a small district, with less than 5,000 students.

Austin Public Schools began using netTrekker last year. The district tallied 675,485 netTrekker searches in the 2008-2009 school year.

NetTrekker is a search engine specifically designed for school use. It is similar to a Google search but netTrekker supplies only pre-screened and educationally relevant K-12 resources, Haugen explained.

For example, a google search of the word “Frog,” supplies 13.7 million sites. A netTrekker search shows 234 sites, each of which is academic in nature, and pre-selected for elementary kids.

Each site netTrekker pulls up has been evaluated for appropriate grade content and given an over-all rating. In addition to key word searches, netTrekker supports state standards, and can highlight specific subject areas and complete cross-curricular search themes.

For students with trouble reading, the site has a read-aloud function that goes along with the text.

NetTrekker is linked to standards-based test results, and it has several resources to help educators direct individual students to work on any weak areas in regards to state standards.

NetTrekker allows students and staff to find information through categories such as grade level, current events, newspapers world-wide, famous people and timelines — filtering out anything inappropriate.

The district also abides by federal legislation that mandates filters on all Internet searches, since students are still able to access the web through Google and other search engines.

“NetTrekker not only keeps kids safe and focused when studying online, but it helps teachers save a lot of valuable time,” Haugen said.

Lindsay Sorenson is a sixth grade teacher at Ellis Middle School who often uses netTrekker in her lesson planning.

“I use it quite a bit for my science classes,” she said.

Sorenson sets up folders on the site, which are full of information for various class projects. The folders contain links to Web sites for students to research and complete online activities.

“Yes, I could do the same thing without netTrekker, but there would be more room for student error, and it would take more time to plan,” Sorenson said.

Students, and their parents, can sign onto netTrekker at home too, Haugen said. Each student has a personal login for their own netTrekker page, which hosts any online work their teachers have posted.

Austin Public Schools and each of the top districts will be awarded with a prize package valued at $5,000. The package includes one day of netTrekker professional development workshops, eight seats in an online workshop that is designed to train educators on 21st century skills of today’s students and other assorted netTrekker items.

NetTrekker was founded in 1999 and currently serves 12 million students, 60,000 teachers and 22,000 schools in North America.