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Friday, April 18, 2008

Cyber Safety

My son's school newsletter came home today with this information and I just felt compelled to share it.

http://www.netsmartz.org/
www.internet-safety.org
www.safewiredschools.cosn.org

The first one is an excellent site for parents to learn about internet safety. It also has activities for kids to learn about internet safety. If you click on the parent/guardian, watch video and then real life stories you can find stories from kids that have experienced dangerous situations while chatting on line. There are many stories for parents that emphasizes the importance of being internet aware and haelping their child be internet safe. There is an interesting story called Tracking Teresa. Press play to see a simulation of how someone can track and find out your name, email address, personal interests, home number and home address and name of yours chool all within 20 minutes of chatting online.

I hope everyone passes this information along...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Great info.

I am the Regional Office of Educations Internet Safety Coordinator. For the past 3 years, I have spear-headed online safety awareness in my entire region.

I have educated over 750 children with curriculms I have developed. I also have developed unique presentations for parents and educators.

Please check out my award winning educational resource blog.

Thanks for getting the word out!

Jace Shoemaker-Galloway
http://InternetSafetyAdvisor.info

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing these helpful links.

I'd love to hear your comments about some of my blog posts on children's Internet safety:
1. Safety Tips for Parents: http://www.covenanteyes.com/blog/2008/03/25/a-parents-guide-to-internet-safety-for-children/
2. Online Predators: http://www.covenanteyes.com/blog/2008/04/03/protecting-kids-online-the-myths-and-realities-of-online-predators/
3. Cyberbullying: http://www.covenanteyes.com/blog/2008/04/07/cyberbullying-the-new-playground/

Have you heard of Covenant Eyes monitoring and filtering programs? It is a unique program on the market because it gives the user flexibility to filter or simply monitor the Internet or both. A good filtering program is very helpful for children and families, but a good monitoring program is great for adults and children alike who want to be accountable to others about where they go online.

Covenant Eyes monitoring program simply tracks (without blocking) everywhere someone goes online. Then each part of each webpage is rated and scored for its content (scores are based on obscene or pornographic material). Users choose 2 or 3 people that they want to receive a detailed "accountability report" of all their online activity (emails to them or available to see online 24/7). What this does is it allows complete freedom to the person using the Internet, but it takes away the anonymity of online activity; people are more likely to exorcise self-control when they know that others will be reviewing their whereabouts online.

Covenant Eyes also has a promotional code you can use to get a free month to try out their accountability service. Go to www.covenanteyes.com and enter promocode 'onefree' to receive a free 30 day trial of the program.

Anonymous said...

You should add PC Pandora to the list of sites to visit and programs to check out. It will monitor activity online AND offline... it records everything, send you email updates and you only have to pay for it once. We’ve had lots of success from parents and teachers who use our program. Regardless, there are a lot of different options out there - do your own research. It's part of the whole "parents need to be educated" thing... Find what works for you. :)