What I Learned This Week: Leapfrog's Seminar on Children & Internet Safety

 

This week Jo-Lynne, Melissa and I headed up to the BIG apple for an internet safety seminar sponsored by Leapfrog. We also got a sneak preview of the new Leapworld, an interactive website that Leapfrog is building for release next spring.

One of the developers was there showing us all the fun elements of Leapworld like a whole section on learning about the weather. That was pretty cool. I am sorry to say that my kids are already too old but perhaps my nieces and nephews will enjoy.

(Can I interject another completely unrelated lesson here? If you have just had dental work like maybe getting fitted for a crown which includes numbing half your mouth and the dentist tells you to wait to eat but tells you to go ahead and drink liquids, don't listen. Until the numbing wears off, I would suggest refrains from drinks too. Why? Because I just now cleaning the coffee off the keyboard where it dribbled from the numb side of my mouth. You really didn't need to know that, did ya?)

Okay, back to Children and Internet Safety. Christy Matte from About.com's Family Computing Guide was asked to come and talk to us about children on the Internet. She definitely suggested parental controls and to know what your child is doing. She also gave us the advice that as the children get older and start getting accounts of their own, to ask them to maybe seal the passwords in an envelope for you to keep -not to spy - but if something were to happen, you would have access you need to shut down the account or look for clues if something more sinister did happen.

Christy reminded us of the importance of watermarking photos, that information put on the 'Net is out there forever somewhere (like look at InternetArchive.org's WayBack Machine to see old snapshots of your blogsite that don't go away), and that there are several options for controlling e-mail content like having all the e-mail to your child go to you first to allowing only certain people's e-mails to come through. I.e. For a minimal lifetime charge, Pikluk, which is PC only allows 5 links and 2 websites with controlled e-mail.

In discussion, I learned that apparently I didn't know how bad the innocent sounding Club Penguin is but other moms did. Kids are getting on and other kids (like mine possibly) can see foul language they type in. Oh, great.

A couple more pieces of advice included: Watch what you put online, think about what your kids will think later and teach kids to never give out passwords to anyone but a parent. 

Kidzui was a web browser mentioned on which sites for kids are already vetted and maintained for appropriate browsing. That sounded interesting.

There was more but I am out of the time I've allotted for blogging today!

Have a good one! Learns lots this week.

Comments

[The Mommy]

Great post!! Thanks for sharing what you learned!

[Terra]

I know i need to mark my photos, it is just an extra step I seem to skip ....shame on me!