The question of personal privacy and security is one that concerns individuals, educators, school boards, businesses and government. The internet has few controls, it could be discribed as the wild wild west.
It is best to be aware of all possibilities and try to minimize any resk. Personally, I have shopped online, I do belong to mailing groups. The “flat world” is a welcome place in rural Manitoba! I am not saying that I proceed without concern, I check the reliability of the site, look at user comments, and continue with caution. We also use a seperate credit card for online purchases, which makes keeping track easier.
As a technology educator, student security and protection is something we talk about all year, often using “teachable moments”. The question of filtering at school is one I hear about regularly. One answer is to try to create a walled-garden, filtering out any questionable sites using tags, keywords, URLs to limit student access to certain sites. I prefer the educate, train and practice approach.
School appropriate websites – most students can recognize an inappropriate site – students should notify the teacher or quickly back out of the site. The benefits of filtering or locking down your system often backfires for teachers, as sites that they know are fine can sometimes be blocked at school.
Helping students learn to understand, read and recognize preferred websites is a life long skill. Alan November’s “Teaching Zack to Think” gives us many ways to understand the language of the web. Security lies in education in my opinion.
We are going to be using online tools, security and privacy can be protected, if you proceed with caution. Using an alias, taking care when filling in, or not filling in, personal information, I would suggest that parents enter any personal information for their children if they want to register for a new tool.
Social Networking sites, email, IMing are a great way to keep track of your family and friends. However, one thing I like to remind my students and during PD sessions is that “Once it is out there, it is out there!” Don’t say something that you would not say to someone’s face. This could prevent some embarrassing, regretable incidents.
Cool Cat Teacher Blog, has a post on 11 steps to online parental supervision of your children. She feels that there should be some filtering on your home computer. Good point for parents.
Excellent entry Janis.
I used to be concerned about using my credit cards online too until someone pointed out that we often give our credit card to a waitress or a clerk in a store who takes it out of our sight and could be doing anything with it. Some of the recent scams include double swiping a card, replacing your card with a stolen one, selling personal information swiped from the card etc.
The use of internet for commerce is a fact of our lives and in rural Manitoba where we don’t have access to as many shops the web has been a major boon. I wear size 14 shoes. Nobody stocks size 14 so I mostly buy my shoes over the net. Easy and often cheaper than I could buy in a regular store.
Now I check for the secure link in the corner of a web site and try to use Paypal every opportunity.
Great post!
Have you used SKYPE? That will be our next class project once everybody is on to blogs.
Great post and pretty funny cartoon. I agree with Glen. I try to use safe sites or well known sites to do any shopping.
I noticed your Flickr photos and it gave me a great idea to share some photos. Thanks!