Refelections on Students and Web Safety

In addressing Web Safety for children it is necessary that the child and his or her family members be educated in how to use the web in a safe way. I have the privilege of working with immigrant and refugee parents as students in the Oakland CBET program. I see that educating them about web safety is a great way to reinforce what their children are learning in school.

The Strategies that I will have CBET teachers teach the parents to use with their children when using the web are are based on advised from Larry Magid (2008). The first and most important strategy is to teach parents to talk with their children about the child's online activity. To have the parents encourage the children to share with the parents what types of information they are finding online. Another strategy for parents is to make sure they contact teachers and counselors at the school to get advice from them about what sites are good and what sites are not. Finally, the parents must become web literate themselves so they can help and monitor their children.

In order to teach the immigrant and refugee parents to be web-literate, the CBET teachers need to learn the basics of how to use a mouse and type on the computer. They are need to learn searching skills. Once they feel comfortable using a computer and searching online they should learn how to map links. Mapping links involves taking a link and finding out what other sites have the link as a reference (November, 2001). Mapping links in this way gives the web use a better idea of the validity of the information they are reading about.

It is important to inform the parents that the information they find on the web is different from information they find in published books because anyone can publish information on the Internet. It is a much more rigorous process for an book author to get his or her book accepted and published by a book publisher. An Internet writer may access sites like aol or geocites to create his or her own website to publish work that needs to be accepted as credible by no one else except the author. The example of a boy finding a site that claimed that the Holocaust did not exist (November, 2001) is a perfect example of how children (and adults) can read something and take it for truth when it is absolutely false.

Thus, it is my goal that when working with immigrant and refugee parents, I teach them how to identify the validity of websites and the information that is published in them. Dan McDowell (1999) published a Teacher Guide for Evaluating Web pages that included having web users find out who the author, publisher, bias and age of the information of the web site in order to determine its credibility. It is my hope that every parent in our CBET program would become familiar with identifying these four things about a website so they can be prepared to better gather information for themselves and for their children.




References

Magid, L. (2008). Child Safety on the Information Highway. Taken from http://safekids.com/child-safety-on-the-information-highway/ on September
17, 2008.
McDowell, D. (1999). Teacher Guide #1: Evaluating Web Pages. Taken from
http://projects.edtech.sandi.net/staffdev/tpss99/processguides/evaluating_teacher.html on September 20, 2008.
November, A. (2001). Teaching Kids To Be Web Literate. Taken from http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/200103/webliterate.php on
September 20, 2008.