Over the weekend, the New York Times published a sobering report about a case in Indiana involving a teenage boy, a teenage girl, a mobile app, and the state’s sex offender registry. It is not, as you might expect, a love story. Last December, Zachery Anderson, a 19-year-old resident of Elkhart, IN, arranged a date…
The Importance of Setting a Good Example Before you can start negotiating effective rules regarding online behavior with your older, more technologically competent children, it’s important to make sure that your own house is in order. Few things will more quickly undermine a serious conversation about safe and ethical online behavior than your child’s awareness…
What Is a Family Acceptable Use Policy? A Family Acceptable Use Policy (FAUP) is a document designed to help you and your children understand the benefits and risks of using the Internet and electronic devices, and to establish household rules regarding their use. It is a document that can be used to organize and clarify…
In the fall of 2014, a complaint was filed with the Disciplinary Tribunal of the New Zealand Teachers Council, alleging that relief teacher Leon Duffy had engaged in an inappropriate conversation with a 15-year-old 10th year student. The complaint was filed by the principal of a New Zealand high school (both unnamed) after receiving a…
[View the story “2015-06-24 #Cyberparenting Twitter Chat” on Storify]
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”4″ gal_title=”2015-06-20 Coney Island Mermaid Parade”] And now for something completely different (and slightly NSFW). Every so often, just for fun, I will post slideshows of photos I’ve taken at special events or on trips. Ever since getting my first decent camera phone, I’ve been taking a lot more photos (offering support for the…
The National Security Agency and the National Science Foundation have teamed up to launch a new summer camp initiative, dubbed GenCyber, aimed at identifying middle and high school students with an interest in cybersecurity and assisting them in developing useful academic and work-related skills. According to the program’s Web site, the goal of the GenCyber…
The Family Online Safety Institute announced yesterday that it will be hosting a Twitter chat “focusing on Cyber Parenting and Internet Safety.” The chat will take place at 3pm EST on Wednesday, June 24, 2015, and will use the hashtag #cyberparenting. For the uninitiated, a “Twitter chat” is a planned question-and-response conversation in which all…
Parents, educators, and law enforcement agencies around the world are grappling with the phenomenon of underage sexting. Despite increasingly strident warnings from adults to children about the risks of taking and distributing nude photos, the trend shows no sign of slacking anytime soon. In fact, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency recently declared that sexting…
[This blog post originally appeared on Good Digital Parenting.] With summer vacation looming (but not fast enough for the kids!), parents are once again confronted with the question of how to keep their children occupied, entertained, and safe during the long break. The challenge of keeping kids safe is a little more complicated than it…
