Safety on the Internet

Good websites on internet safety for young people

 

 

Childnet International  is an excellent resource for teachers, kids and parents.  You can download "tips" for kids, brochures for parents, teaching ideas, and activities to teach children about staying safe on the internet.

 

 

Cheryl Oakes' Wiki on Internet Safety for Parents  includes podcasts, book recommendations, articles, and an extensive list of websites  about internet safety.   Though designed for a parent workshop, these resources are  applicable to anyone.

 

 

 Teachers First compiles many web resources for teaching about internet safety.

Teachers' blog posts  about how they teach internet safety:

In this blog post, a teacher explains how he teaches his 5th graders about the need to stay away from inappropriate content when browsing sites on the web.  He also talks about how he scaffolds them from more protected web use (class accounts, accessed only through a link on a class wiki, rather than wide open access to the web).

 

Another teacher explains here how he teaches his students how to keep their identities private.     He also discusses cyberbullying with them.

 

Bionic Teacher has a series of blog posts  tagged "safety" that include posters and comic book pages that he's created.

 

The Tempered Radical writes specifically about how he addresses the possibility of kids putting inappropriate content on their class wiki (which, he explains, is over 200 pages!).

 

In this post, a blogger writes about how he and a fellow teacher made the case for using Voice Thread in spite of district concerns about safety.  Read the comments, also. 

 

A steb-by-step guide to getting 4th graders started on blogging --safely -- can be found here. 

Blog Posts from Others with Resources on Internet Safety

On this post, you'll find links to videos about the harm done by cyberbullying as well as websites with teaching strategies and resources to teach children about what to do if they are cyber-bullied and why young people have to understand the harm that they can do to others while on the internet.

 

Setting up Safe Email For Kids

Some web 2.0 tools require kids to have email addresses, and we don't want to subject them to spam or other inappropriate messages that may come into open accounts.

GMail

Here is a video tutorial on how to set up sub-accounts for kids under a teacher's Gmail account so that the teacher first views any email coming to the student.

MintEmail

Larry Ferlazzo blogs about using MintEmail with kids.  MintEmail sets up email accounts that live for only a few hours, but work for websites requiring email confirmation.

Safer Search Engines for Kids

 

Google allows you to create a custom search engine tailored for your own needs.  Teachers could post this custom search tool on their blogs, wiki pages, or websites.

 

Check out this website for a long list of great kid-safe search engines. 

 

 

Safer Blogging

You can set up any blog to be accessible only to people that you invite (students and their parents? Your partner classroom in New Zealand) and to moderate all comments before they're posted.

 

In Blogger, you can also help your nextwork administrator to disable the "Next Blog" button that appears by default at the top of each blog page by following these directions.

Without this buton, kids cannot get elsewhere within Blogger accidentally.   Those of you adept at code can disable this on individual blogs following these directions.

Involving Parents

Bill Ferriter (The Tempered Radical blogger) has created this permission slip outlining child, parent, and teacher responsibilities for internet safety. 

What's Working in Innovative Districts?

Here is a very good article describing district policies and practices in some Alabama schools.