Frankly, I think the focus on cyberpredators in Internet Safety classes gets way too much attention, to the detriment of other things students should learn to be safe online. It's akin to Dateline spending all the time on luring men in to get busted rather than really showing how kids (and adults) can be safe online.
That being said, I'm sure you'll spend some time on how to be "Safe on MySpace" etc. so here are a few tips on that:
1. Always set your profile to "Private"
2. Make "new friends" know your name or email address to request friendship.
3. Don't put a picture of yourself on your main profile page.
4. Make sure your friends also follow the above guidelines.
5. If anything inappropriate happens, tell your parent (or teacher or other trusted adult).
6. Learn what is appropriate and inappropriate online. If you're uncomfortable with what is happening, it's probably inappropriate.
Now... for more likely "bad stuff" that will happen online and how to protect yourself:
1. If you're on MySpace and you go to someone's page (from a link in a bulletin is the most common way) and you get a "MySpace" page that says "you must be logged in to do that..." DON'T LOGIN AGAIN! You're at a phishing page (usually set up by teens to get user names and passwords of peers). Know what phishing is and how to prevent it. To check, see what the address of the login page is. This is common practice amongst thieves who steal logins to Paypal, ebay, and banks. It's also quite prevalent on MySpace. Report any found offending pages to MySpace.
2. Don't forward bulletins that say "you must forward this or die a horrible death etc." That is flat out extortion, rude, inappropriate, and may indeed be passing along links within bulletins that take you to spam sites, porn, whatever. Bulletins that promise "click this and get 90,000 friends" should definitely be discarded out of hand, or "click this and see who has viewed your profile." It doesn't work, and it's probably some sort of spyware that you'll install.
3. Set up a MySpace User Group for your school and get everyone who has MySpace at your school to "watch out" for each other in general. MySpace encourages schools to self-monitor, however most schools think they're "doing their job" by banning the site at school. This does nothing to make kids safe online at home. Indeed, try and form a "MySpace Club" or "Net Club" at school and focus on safe practices all around.
4. If you're running Windows XP, and when your computer boots up you only have one user account, that is an admin account. I strongly recommend setting up a "NetSurf" account that has *limited privileges*. Password protect your admin account and only surf from the NetSurf one. This will give you added protection from "malware" sites that may insidiously introduce viruses or trojans on your computer with just a click.
5. Keep your firewall and virus protection up to date. If you can't afford virus protection there is an excellent freeware available at
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1 called AVG. Windows now has a free firewall and others are available.
6. Download and install Spybot Search and Destroy and Adaware.
7. Find the *good* sites out there and share them with your peers. There is a lot more that students may do to further their own education and indeed, even get credit at schools. Learn about Global Project Based Learning and check out sites like Tapped In
http://www.tappedin.org, TakingItGlobal
http://www.takingitglobal.org and Nabuur
http://www.nabuur.com. These are just a few. If you spend time doing interesting, important, creative things online, you'll be less apt to get into trouble.
There are other tips and hints, but this will give you a few things to think about for your presentation. I do echo Anne's advice to make it as interactive as possible. Indeed, depending on the number of participants I'd recommend getting computer lab access so that people can be hands on rather than simply being "lectured to."
Feel free to contact me if you'd like further assistance. I can be reached at Tapped In (JeffC there) or jbcoops at gmail.
Regards,
Jeff Cooper
Education Technology Support Consultant --
Edited by jbcoops at 03/18/2007 10:25 AM
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Edited by jbcoops at 03/18/2007 5:27 PM
