School officials are afraid of everything. The school I work at has blocked slashdot because they say students can use it to find out how to "hack the system".

They also call notepad a "hacker's tool" and don't allow students access to it... unless they know how to open any .txt file which brings up notepad.

I think that everyone in a school setting needs more tech training, students and teachers. Let people learn and explore and face to consequences of their own actions rather than locking everything so tight it barely resembles a computer.

HTML in a basic text editor is a great place to start. It teaches how to open and close tags and the importance of correct syntax.

You can also make it more complex by adding CSS or Javascript which resemble real programming.