Internet Safety

I read several articles and watched a few videos. One that stuck our for me was a youtube video about a mother that lost her daughter to sexting. Unfortunately some teenagers have begun sending explicit material via texts to boy/girlfriends or even strangers they have met online. In this particular video the girl sent an image of herself to her boyfriend who then passed the photo around. Soon the scanty photo got sent all over the school and the poor girl was harassed and made fun of where ever she went. Eventually it got bad enough that she took her own life. This is a sad example of what can happen to teenagers when they are not careful with media. In another video I watched I thought it interesting that one company discovered that one of the ways teenagers can get duped into giving out personal information is for false online job applications. Many teenagers may not trust giving out personal information to a stranger normally but if they think they are applying for a legitimate job they could easily be fooled. Since I have a little girl I want to make sure that when she gets older she understands that while social networking can be good she needs to be aware that some people that visit these sites are malicious and plan on ruining those they meet. She as well as students I may teach one day should understand that personal information such as social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates should not be shared on the web. The risk is just too high that someone can take advantage of you. Another article that I thought was interesting about getting sucked into the web is by Elder Ballard. He said gives a few suggestions of questions we should ask ourselves from time to time to see if we are addicted to the web. He asks do we sacrifice real world things for online things. I thought that was really profound. I love to watch baseball. Even though the white sox are not even in season I find myself wanting to check blogs like mlbtradrumors.com to see what is happening to the team in the offseason like trades etc. My wife one day asked me if I would stop checking up on the team every day and even told me that I was addicted and could not go three days without checking out what is going on with the white sox. I thought that was ridiculous but when I tried to give it up it really was hard to just let it go. I decided then to limit myself. Not only can students be taken advantage of with the internet or media like cell phones and texting but they can simply get sucked into wasting time surfing the net. Giving up our precious time for that which is not profitable. These are just a few things I learned while studying internet safety. Tomorrow morning I will discus this with my wife and let you know what we think about internet safety and how to avoid the problems associated with poor internet usage.