Technology has transformed day-to-day life whether that be in how we shop or get around. School isn’t an exception either as many of the materials needed run off the cloud. Social media and overall internet access have increased the dangers for children which is why it’s important to teach them about online safety from an early age. A prep school in London has a great list of ways that you can explore internet safety with your child which we have shared below.
Making Friends
The internet seems like an exciting place to children where they can meet others and make new friends on social media and social gaming platforms like movie star planet. Unfortunately, it’s just as easy for internet users to impersonate others and target children. To help protect your child from these sorts of people, you can teach them to not add strangers online and just the people that they know in real life. That will make them more cautious when adding people and prevent stranger danger.
Managing Privacy
As well as being cautious about who to add, it’s important for children to maintain their privacy online and not overshare. Social media has made it easy for stalkers to find out almost anything on the internet from where children go to school with a selfie and where they are. This is where a private profile where all of this is kept secret can help.
Harmful Content
Indecent content is something else that children should be protected from and there are ways that you can block this harmful content. For example, you can block sites with your internet provider and off their devices. Pop-ups can also be banned, helping them to stay safe online. These sites and pop-ups can be looked up with the help of forums. This is advisable as it’ll usually show a list of websites that are labelled as harmful. Sometimes, these pages have been collected through web scraping. You can always enter the keywords “webscraping explained” to learn more about the process. Perhaps, you might be inspired to scrape through the sites yourself and double check the harmful content. The end goal is to protect your child. So, the more relevant sites you come across which can be blocked, the better your child will be protected.
Monitor Screen Time
By sitting with your child while they do their homework online, you can be of assistance when they get stuck and keep a closer eye on what they use it for. You can also teach them about finding reliable information from trustworthy sites and how to avoid those that aren’t.
Fake News
Fake news is easy to come across too. Just because a post happens to have lots of shares, it doesn’t make it true. It’s important that children know this before being swept up by fake news as it can be harmful. Tools like Snopes fact check information and bring up the relevant and credible sources that reference them.