Protecting Your Children on the Internet: A Road Map for Parents and Teachers

About the Book

The Internet and technologies that enable online interaction and access to a variety of content can be a perilous place for minors between 8 and 18. Parents and teachers are often ill-equipped to deal with the variety of devices and applications such as email, instant messaging, browsing, blogs, cell phones, and personal digital assistant devices (PDAs) that can facilitate the dangers lurking online. This book shares the risks of the Internet by detailing recent, real-world tragedies and revealing some of the secrets of online activities. It provides a pragmatic approach to help parents and teachers protect children against the threats of going online.

Protecting Your Children on the Internet provides a roadmap to enable parents and teachers to become more engaged in children's online activities, arming them with techniques and tips to help protect their children. Recommendations come by technology topic (search engines, social networking, cell phones, etc.) and by age category (elementary, middle, high school) to align with how parents and educators think when they're dealing with multiple children that span different risk profiles. Smith underscores his arguments through chilling, real-life stories, revealing approaches people use to deceive and conceal their activities online. Filled with practical advice and recommendations, this book is indispensable to anyone who uses the Internet and related technologies, especially to those charged with keeping children safe.

Table of Contents:

Part 1 Introduction to Technology and Risks on the Internet
Chapter 2 Welcome to the Internet
Chapter 3 Back to School
Chapter 4 Risks Overview: Are Parents Making the Grade?
Chapter 5 The Risks of Going Online
Part 6 A Roadmap to Protect Children While Online
Chapter 7 How to Monitor Your Kids Online
Chapter 8 Internet Surfing, Blogs, and Social Networking
Chapter 9 Email
Chapter 10 Instant Messaging and Voice-over-IP
Chapter 11 Cell Phones and PDAs
Chapter 12 A Glimpse into the Future
Chapter 13 Talking to Your Kids about Online Risks

About the Author :
Gregory S. Smith is vice president and CIO for an international conservation organization based in Washington, DC., and adjunct professor in the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education, graduate programs, at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He's the author of Straight to the Top: Becoming a World-Class CIO and regularly speaks internationally and publishes best-practice articles on a variety of business and technology topics and magazines. His experience as an internationally recognized IT executive, educator, and parent make him the ideal expert for this important text.

Review :
Gregory Smith offers parents an extremely powerful resource that is long overdue. This very "parent-friendly" book should be required reading before allowing your child or teen to go online! Today's parents need to make protecting their children online a priority and they need to know about the available tools and how to implement them. From technology to tips, Greg Smith's book provides a comprehensive tool that guides parents on how to create a safe online environment. The Internet can be fantastic place, AND a dangerous place. Gregory Smith lays out how to better understand that place in terms of our children's safety. As parents, we need to understand what our children are doing online, and this book is a great help to those of us who are novices at technology. The book should be required reading for all parents of teens and preteens—most of whom know far less than their own children about the Internet. Worried about protecting your children on the Internet? This is a must-read for every parent and educator. An informative and well-researched guide, this is an invaluable tool in understanding the Internet and its galloping revolution. Gregory Smith's how-to book is key to ensuring our children's safety on the internet. I hope administrators consider making this required reading. A thorough if occasionally geeked-out look at the technologies children are using and the steps parents must take to minimize their kids' chances of having a bad experience online. Smith, the chief information officer for the World Wildlife Fund, shows the 5 million ways your kids can get around the basic barriers many parents set up. He advocates a more deliberate, comprehensive approach, including aggressively limiting your child's Internet use: For middle schoolers, he recommends banning instant messaging, blocking search engines such as Google and denying access to free e-mail services such as Yahoo Mail. The amount of technical detail will liberate some and overwhelm others (hey, welcome to the Internet, folks), but you can always skip to Smith's helpfully specific recommendations, including which filtering and monitoring programs work best.