I read a great post today from Net Family News (Monitoring MySpacers, Part 2 ). The first quote that caught my eye was

“I believe that to educate our kids is their best protection.”

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I try use this as my philisophy not only as a teacher, but as a parent as well. With two teenagers and a pre-teen in the house, I am in the middle of MySpace, IMing, and up/downloading of pictures, music and videos. Each of my children have a computer with Internet access in their room. The two teenagers have MySpace accounts, the pre-teen is not interested as of yet. They know that “their space” is “my space” too and that mom is periodically checking their site. We look at different profiles from their classmates together and point out how unsafe some of their postings and innapropriate some of the pictures are (tongue sticking out/sexy clothing and poses/alcohol/etc). i also try to encourage them, when they post unsafe content on their friends’ sites to let them know that it might not be such a good idea.

The web is shifting, so must the conversations that we have with our students and children. It is not about the things that they might encounter and might download online anymore, but also what and how kids are uploading. This needs to be an ongoing conversation.

“Until I found their profiles,” Brad said, “my education with them was about not downloading. Now it’s focused on not uploading – pics and personal information.” He’s making sure they’re thinking about how “everything is public and even in your private network [of friends] people can copy and re-post it in the open. We discussed mostly what is inappropriate and why, i.e., pics, nude pics, bad jokes.

Posted: 8. September, 2006 at 9:18 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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