Snow Day Is for Surfing as Pupils Play on Internet

January 15, 1999

Snow Day Is for Surfing as Pupils Play on Internet

By JODI WILGOREN
ang up the sled. Put Scrabble back in the box. Surfing is the new snow day activity of choice.
That would be surfing on the Web, of course, not the water (unless you want to try the moving waves on Go Surf).
With industry experts estimating that more than five million children nationwide have Internet access, a day of canceled classes means clogged chat rooms and crowded cartoon Web sites.
Internet service providers estimate that use jumps more than 10 percent during the winter, and Bell Atlantic, whose phone lines connect people to the Internet, reported swollen activity throughout New York State yesterday, with the system logging its average daily volume of 120 million calls by 5 P.M., barely two-thirds of the way through the day.
Some of that spike is probably from increased phone calls and more adults working from home, two phenomena often associated with stormy weather. But experts also believe it is partly because when dozens of districts in the New York region declared a day off on Thursday, thousands of schoolchildren scrambled to their desks at home to click the day away.
Adam Mele, 15, a sophomore at Fairfield High School in Connecticut, spent about three hours playing Half Life, a three-dimensional interactive shooting game. Lisa Kravitz, 13, an eighth-grader at Pelham Middle School in Westchester County, N.Y., went to www.gurl.com and looked up her horoscope. And a New Jersey teen-ager scrolled the love-life advice boards and exchanged instant messages with her friends, some of whom live just down the block.
Cindy Berry of Darien, Conn., who has two sons, said, "When you and I were kids, we would talk to our friends all day at school and then call them when we got home; they E-mail each other." Her sons, Nicholas, 8, and Christopher, 11, exchanged computer messages with friends yesterday morning to plan their snow-shoveling business.
"It is nice to know that they're using their minds," Mrs. Berry said. "A lot of these games are pretty hard. I think there's educational value on line. If there's no school, they're certainly still using their writing skills and communication skills, and hopefully picking up some education along the way."
America Online's Ask the Teacher feature typically collects about 6,000 homework questions a day. But E-mail is the top on-line activity for children younger than 13, according to a recent survey by Jupiter Communications, an Internet research company. Games and surfing the Internet ranked second and third, and homework was fourth.
"You can't really get frostbitten" on line, said Lisa, who built a snowman Thursday before clicking on the computer. "You can't really get to many places" in the snow, she said, "and the Internet's right here, and you can go all around the world."
On Teen People on Line, a popular site for children that can be accessed through America Online, the "Daily Buzz" yesterday bore the headline, "Snowed in? Get Surfing." It suggested cuddling up to the computer with a mug of cocoa and checking out sites to color with virtual crayons, get movie reviews, and climb Mount Everest -- virtually.
Karen-Kristie Prior, community manager of Teen People On Line, said the normal peak period for her Web site is from 3 P.M. to midnight. But in the winter, there are days with thousands of postings between 9 A.M. and 3 P.M.
"I think the reason that it's popular is kids, they want to talk to one another," Ms. Prior said. "If they're not in school, they're missing that social outlet."
Sure enough, many children and teen-agers interviewed by telephone and E-mail said they spent their snow day doing nothing more exotic than chatting with friends on the computer.
"I actually like talking to my friends on the computer more," Christopher Berry said. "I just do. It's good because I can play computer games while I'm talking to them on the Internet."

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