3/7/2010

I got a lot of the i-SAFE assignments accomplished this week. I know how serious Internet safety is, but I still could not believe the statistics presented in the videos. For example, in the pre-assessment, "11% of students say they're willing to meet somebody they met online face to face." Meeting people face to face from the Internet always seemed like an obvious hazard to me. It is on the same level as taking drugs--you just don't do it. To think that 11 out of 100 students think it is OK, is absolutely beyond me. To make things worse, "8% of students say they did meet somebody face to face." Since so many students are on social networking sites, there is an overwhelming need to make sure they know what is safe and what is not. The simple act of creating a screen name, for example, can lead to unwanted attention from predators. As one of the videos showed, a predator can narrow down their prey from every person on the planet by starting with the screen name. Something like Sportychick14 reveals that it is a female, likes to play sports, and is probably 14 years old.