SAFETY KIDS

These links give us important advice of how we can protect our kids and students from spam, viruses and inappropriate content. We need to be sure that children are safe when they are online. The obvious solution would be to track the web pages that the kids are visiting, but nowadays children are so good with computers that they can erase their tracks. I think that it is more important and effective to communicate openly with children and establish clear rules about Internet use. This would mean parental supervision. Filtering tools may be helpful with young children, when you use the tools to complement, not replace parental supervision. As teachers, we have to make sure the students go to sites we have chosen and teach them to never share personal information over the Internet.

4Kids.org is a good and safe website for kids; it has funny games that promote learning and it also gives us advice about filtering software. Kids Search Engines by, Danny Sulivan, gives us filtering tips and a list of links that might be inappropriate for children. Kids Search Engines and Connectsafety.org gives us tips and advise on how to safeguard our kids; like detecting web pages that may seem safe, but are not. Safekids.com is another internet site that has tools to protect children, like alerting when children may be having exposure to inappropriate material, physical molestation, harassment, bullying, viruses and hackers.

The article, “A short introduction to the study of Holocaust revisionism,” by Arthur R. is the perfect example of why we need to check what children reading. This shocking and disgusting article seeks to "prove" that the Jewish Holocaust did not happen, calling it a “legend”. I wouldn’t allow my Elementary students review this article because it contains inappropriate material for them.

The article,” Teaching Kids to be Literate,” by Allan November brings to light the fact about the web as he states. Allan expresses how important is that children learn how to research, publish, and work with the Internet and other information tools. We need to teach our students not to trust everything they read on the Web. All of these websites have helped me to learn more about how I can create a safe environment when my students are using the web.

Finally, the Teacher Guide #1: Evaluating Web Pages gives us an excellent guide of how to select good resources for our students. Also this website gives us more links that we can use to learn how to evaluate the resources. For example, checking the age of the information, who is the author and who provide it. All of these websites have helped me to learn more about how I can create a safe environment when my students are using the web. Remember: nothing is more important than the safety and well being of our children!