Protecting Our Children from the Internet Essay

Educate your children - Be clear about the kind of personal information your children should not divulge over the Internet, including their names, addresses, and phone numbers. Teach your children what to do if a stranger approaches them online. Monitoring software will allow you to monitor, chats, emails, website visits, and internet searches so you can keep informed silently. Specifically, tell children to cut off communication with any person they don't know and to notify you

Surely children today need a relationship with technology in order to thrive. The way that we can foster these bonds is by introducing technology to students in a classroom at a young age. If students are taught to respect technology and use it properly from the beginning of their relationship with it, these habits will continue into their teenage years and beyond into their adult lives. One-to-one computing from kindergarten on will allow students access to technology on demand, in the classroom and at home. By doing this, we allow students access to their learner profiles 24/7, giving them the option to learn anytime they please. Teachers can also tailor

Parents can also have a more direct role in monitoring the technology that their children use. There are multiple options available to parents, including tools and software designed specifically to protect juveniles from online predators. One popular tool is the Net Nanny, which allows parents to monitor everything that happens on the computer and can limit the access a person has to online activities based on the specified settings (Cohen-Almagor, 197). Another method available is the Engine for Relationship Analysis (ERA), which monitors, analyzes, and assesses online relationships as they develop (Cohen-Almagor, 197). This tool could be effective with preteens and teens as it allows more freedom than the Net Nanny, but still keeps parents informed of any potential issue. The ERA is used to analyze instant messaging platforms, which would be an effective method to track as using email would stifle the conversation and there would be a greater risk for the predator of being caught. This type of prevention would work well with addressing the issue of having a capable guardian concerning Routine Activities

Writer Harlan Coben, states in his article, “Everything your child types can already be seen by the world.” Teachers, potential employers, friends, neighbors, can view the things your children are doing. There are online messages that are recorded and kept by search engines. Which means other people can see conversations that were talked about before.

As long as you have a connection, you can surf the web. There are ways around parental controls so you cannot monitor your child with 100 percent success. "I just discovered that 13 year olds are smarter than the parent generation" states a concerned mother in an article titled "Bypassing parental controls in AOL." Apparently, all the child has to do is minimize the AOL window and open up an IE browser since the controls in AOL do not apply to IE.

The children will try to find ways for their parents not to know what they are doing online. They will not use the computers where the software is installed they will try to use their parents computers or will just use a computer outside the house. By telling them you give them a heads up that they are being watched and they will only visit bad websites when parents are not watching. The children will be more careful in exposing themselves on the social media sites because they will not want you to know their postings and they will definitely try to hide they strangers they speak to because they will feel that their parents are on their shoulders 24/7 invading their privacy, watching what they do on the

The sharing of information may well be the most advanced activity of the twenty-first century occurring across ages and backgrounds with relative ease. Nevertheless, the use of information that is aired through the internet raises several genuine concerns regarding nature, intent, source, and destination as well as the consequences of the content. This is particularly true when the information has to do with people 's identities and other activities that may touch on critical aspects of national security and unauthorized business. As such, there is a mix of reactions among individuals regarding the extent of privacy they would like regarding information that they share or retrieve on the internet. While some may have genuine concerns such as protecting their identity, others are on malicious tracks to cover their person and conduct unwarranted business on the web. The mix of concerns led to the rise of the Dark Web on darknets. A darknet is an overlay network that utilizes the public Internet but requires authorization or special software to access mainly to protect the user’s identity and location from network surveillance and traffic analysis (Sui, Caverlee & Rudesill 2003). Such trends on the internet raise the question; is the Dark Web an important and necessary tool to offset pervasive online surveillance in contemporary society or is the moral panic surrounding the Dark Web in global news media justified? The aim of this research is to answer the raised question

When discussing internet censorship, one of the major concerns is what children can see on the internet. Internet censorship was a huge deal during the 1990’s and early 2000’s and it still is to this very day. The internet back then was much different than it is today. Back then, we could only access the internet from a computer and most people didn’t own one back then. Nowadays, most people have multiple computers and a cell phone that can access the internet. It was easier for parents to control what their children could have access to back then. Now, parents can still put restrictions on the router settings and set a timer for when the internet shuts off but kids can always just go somewhere else that may have internet access to view any

Because no-one can fully remove the bad stuff from the internet and make it completely safe, steps are put in place to ensure that children and young people are somewhat safe whilst browsing:

Get the passwords to all your children’s Facebook, twitter, email and other social accounts. Make sure the family computer is in a common area and the screen can be seen by all. If your children have cell phones, switch over to a prepaid plan that you can control so they can not send pictures or text messages.

While elementary and middle schools have obvious needs for restrictions, Internet access at the high school level isn't as black and white. High school students are sensitive to their given rights, yet are officially minors under the law; teenagers are ever nearing adulthood, but are sometimes viewed as immature. So, high school administrators are challenged with designing an Internet policy that meets the educational needs of the students and the moral demands of society. Although software is being designed to "censor" the content of the Internet, student trust and responsibility might be a more reasonable route.

The top three filters that are used ar Url-based, keyword-based, and finally blacklist-based. Out of the schools asked the schools said 70% use Url-based filters. This is because the filter goes more in-depth and doesn’t take away from the students learning experience. Url-based is where the filter will search for educational sites and filter out the ones that are not educational. After a list of bad sites has been generated the filter will then block those site from minors accessing them will connected to the schools internet. The second filter type, which is keyword-based, is used in 60% of the schools asked. Keyword-based could be good because the filter reads the whole site and if there are any words that have been blacklisted in the filters software then the filter will block the whole site from minors access. So let's say the website the student was trying to access had a the word, “Pornography” on it the filter would ban the website from viewing. Third, Blacklists, Blacklists have a set list of websites that have been put together by the government that they think the information on the site is harmful to minors and should be blocked from access. When schools were asked if their online content was filtered 98% said content is filtered at school. The question is though to what extent. 94% said they use filtering software such as the

These words may include “computer”, “disk”, ‘CD Rom”, and “monitor”. After introducing a few terms children are exposed to how to turn the computer on and off. Before having children operate the computers on their own it is extremely important to enforce the safety precautions when using a computer. To introduce a floppy disk to children have them hold a disk, then demonstrate how to handle the disk and insert the disk into the computer. Following the group exercise children should be given time to practice how to turn the computer “on” and “off” as well as insert the disk (Borgh, 1996). Timing is crucial when introducing children to computers. They need an abundance of time to experiment and explore the computer in order to fully understand how to use the computer on their own, as they learned with any other educational tool such as a pen and paper (Haugland, 2000). Teaching young children how to run programs is the next step. Children can be shown how to open and close a program as well aa how to get back to the “menu” to choose another program. Taking the time to properly introduce children to the computer at a young age will provide yet another resource for learning.

The time in which children spend on the computer/tablet will be limited. I will also discuss with the children about the importance of keeping safe online, not forwarding on chain letters, not talking to people they don’t know, not giving out personal information that could enable people to identify them, to tell me if they are worried about anything and to never arrange to meet anyone they have spoken to online.

The Internet provides access to all kinds of content at the click of a mouse - but not all of that content is suitable for children and young people to see. While you may have the appropriate parental controls set up on your computer your child may still be able to access inappropriate material if someone in their social networking circle makes it