| What is "Cyber Awareness" and why do we need to be aware of it? It's a good question and one well worth addressing before going any further. Is it protecting your personal information? Is it keeping your computer safe and secure? Or is it protecting your children or students while they are on-line? The answer is YES! Cyber Awareness is knowing how |
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| to keep your computer safe and secure. It
is also protecting your personal information. Finally, and probably
most importantly, it IS protecting our children while they are on-line and
teaching them how to protect themselves. Children today face many
threats in their daily lives. Threats that they may or may not even be
aware of. Being aware that a threat is out there, is the first step to
protecting ourselves against it. I hope to provide you with the
resources to teach our children how to protect themselves at least while
they are on-line. If we could, we would constantly watch our children
whenever they were on-line. Unfortunately, this is unrealistic.
Therefore, we need to make them aware of the threats and how to protect
themselves against them.
Our county has an "Acceptable Use and Practices Policy" that anyone who uses a Wicomico County Board of Education computer has to agree to abide by while on that computer. Our children, however, are not always using WCBOE computers. We need to teach them and their parents how to protect themselves and their computers while on-line. The first thing that our children need to do is know whom they are dealing with while on-line. Many of our children are entirely too trusting. It does not occur to them that someone might not be truthful about who they are or how old they are. This ignorance can be very dangerous to our children. They need to be taught to be aware that while on-line people are not always who they say they are. On the flip side it is helpful to those protecting our children to know whom their on-line friends are and supervise their chat areas. Secondly, we all need to know what to do if something goes wrong. If you think a child is in danger, you can visit www.getnetwise.org to find out more information. If you wish to report an instance of child exploitation visit the site for the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children's Cyber Tip Line. They need be taught to protect their personal information. Our children sometimes unwittingly provide too much personal information. In the wrong hands, this information can be extremely dangerous to our children. We need to teach our children what information is appropriate to share and what needs to be kept private. To begin with, we need to realize that our children are more tech savvy than some of us! We need to keep up on our skills to stay one step ahead of our children. Keep your computer in a central area where you can more easily monitor their activities. Use the internet with your children. Know where they are going while on the net. Consider implementing parental controls. Your browser may provide some parental controls. To find those options, click Tools on your menu bar, select Internet Options, choose the Content tab, and click the Enable button under Content Advisor. While this is helpful, some parents may want to investigate purchasing separate software packages that allow you to control where your children go on the net. You may also want to check out software packages that allow you to monitor your children's e-mail and web traffic. While some may consider this an invasion of privacy, you have to ask yourself if it is more important for them to have their privacy or is it more important for them to stay alive? Think about it. There is so much more we can discuss when it comes to Cyber Awareness. If you would like more information click here to see a list of links that will give you more articles on this topic.
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