Virtually Dangerous

I’m sitting here today thinking about my elementary class… and trying to count the number of times that I had to tie shoe laces. You know, how can a child who can’t even tie his or her own shoe laces be aware of potential hazards that exist on the internet? There are a few obvious things that I think we should explore. Firstly, access to explicit materials such as pornography or intoxicants are too numerous to count. Thank goodness for screened sites that are available to us as educators. Well even if our students to not go out and seek out trouble, trouble more often than not will come seeking them. Getting a child to give up personal information such as an address or a phone number is much easier than convincing an adult, and the information just as damaging. Let’s take it one step further, how about child exploitation or cyber bullying? How about, what I’ll call, ‘marginal points of view and ideas’? How about the millions upon millions of advertisements out there? How do we as educators and parents (thank goodness I’m not a parent yet) protect children from them?
I think one thing – Education - for ourselves and for our children. There’s just too much of the dangers to get specific… a gradual easing of the child into the internet and teaching them web awareness, I think is the only way to go.

Q