Educational dilemma

When do inherent risks outweigh benefits?

Here's the philosophical side: I've been reading a lot about motivating students by tapping into their love of gaming. I't a research-based technique that's recommended by many experts. This research says that's what students do in their free time, and that's what they love to do. So that's what we should do whenever we can make educational use of it in a classroom.

Move to the application in the classroom side: I teach 7th grade computers, where about half the curriculum is oriented toward keyboarding skills - striving for 35+ words per minute with 2 or less errors per minute on a 3 minute timing. This, in and of itself, is less than glamorous to a 7th grader. So I've tried to find games that support that part of the curriculum.

Enter http://play.typeracer.com - The site provides lines from various books and articles that people are asked to type - most of what I've seen are excerpts from books, songs, poetry - and appropriate for use in a classroom. There are two sections - a place to practice, and a place to race against others. After logging into the site, and working with it for just a couple of moments, all students were able to understand the game and how to play. Most of them were fully engaged for the alloted time. A couple of them were extremely competitive and became quite vocal as time progressed, and I could see that there was a spark that had caught on.

Here's where the question comes in. Students race against opponents randomly chosen from whomever is logged into the site at any given time.

We can specify and control in the classroom what our students may or may not use for a name when they sign into the game; not so with the rest of the random players from around the world who are on the site. Some of these names are not well chosen, and the students brought a couple of these to my attention. Nothing I saw was extremely offensive, but some still not entirely school appropriate. The practical thought here is that there's nothing this MySpace & MTV & Facebook genreation that I'm teaching hasn't seen. But I don't want to appear to condone the use of this type of language or vernacular in a classroom.

I like the site. The students like the site. It has educational value for typing skills. But should I restrict them from it because of what they just MIGHT see on it from other players around the world? If I continue to use the site, what's the best way to with those random occurrences when and if they arise?

Any thoughts are appreciated.