Although I haven't explored this site in detail, it's obviously chock full of information for parents, teachers or whoever, who want to keep kids safe on the internet.


There's a video on the home page which really sums up what the site is about.

If you haven't seen this site before, I hope you find it useful, and if you have, spread it around.

ThinkUKnow:

Here is my advice to parents who want to monitor their kids online:

1. Put the computer in a public room. Like a din, family room, living room whatever you call it.
Kids are much less likely to do questionable things if they think their parents are looking over their shoulder.

2. Install monitoring software. I used to be all against this practice but then I got to thinking and there is just too much bad stuff out there to worry about privacy. Now if your kid is like 16 or something then I wouldn't recommend this but hopefully you already knew that. But if you see some stuff on the reports you don't like you have to be somewhat reasonable about what you call attention too. If your kid is using bad language or talking to friends about who they have a crush on then just leave them alone and act like you didn't see it.(be thankful you even know whats going on) But if you see them talking about drugs, or meeting some child predator or something freaky then yeah its time to act. I think its better to let the kid know that the software is on the computer(as long as its one with a password preventing it from being disabled) because chances are they won't try to do anything wrong if they know they are being watched. Its hard to find a good line between spying and caring but the more liberally you treat it the less chances your kids are going to try and avoiding the software(which considering the current state of parents vs kids in technology they probably will be able to do).

There are lots of free softwares out there that will do this:
http://www.radiance.m6.net/ Scroll down
(They have internet filtering software and software that will email you reports of everything that is done on the computer. Including email, IMs, ect)

3. Use child safe internet search engines. I just dug up and old topic about filtering porn:
http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showto...l=child+monitor

Humpty posted a link with a bunch of them:
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156191

4. Let them know whats out there and warn them. Take some time to actually explain all of the dangers of posting their name, address, ect and what could happen and has happened to other people.

Most of this stuff I would advise for young kids. Maybe younger then 14 or so.
Its hard with teenagers but you just have to decide if you trust them or not.

I've set up a couple of computers for people with kids that wanted to be able to monitor them and these things seem to work pretty well. I haven't heard about any strangeness happening with them sense.