Educating Schoolchildren About Internet Safety: How to Play Safely on a Virtual Playground

In speaking with a 4th grade class about internet safety recently, I asked for a show of hands of children who had ever given out their address or e-mail on MySpace or similar sites. Three or four hands of the schoolchildren shot up into the air. I next asked them how many of them had clicked on ads and filled out forms of the win-a-free-iPod sort. Almost all of the hands went up, and everybody started trying to talk over each other to tell me their own story of frustration with these ads. Listening to them was as educating to me as I was trying to be to them. Adults often hope to teach their kids about internet safety by sheltering them from the internet. While this is a reasonable plan, another route is to simply begin educating kids about the internet in a way that lets them understand how the internet really works and how to guard themselves in this virtual playground, just as they would on a real playground.

It is instructive for kids to know that 3 types of intruders will try to trick them on the internet: Meanies, Big Meanies, & Very Bad Meanies. On the other hand, FAIRies are also close by, who are interested in playing fair.

Meanies

Just as adults are, kids are intrigued by social networking sites that are cut from the same cloth as MySpace. Certain sites cater to kid's interests with kid-themed ads, drawing kids to click. Just as MySpace does, these sites try to elicit information from kids in order to pinpoint their interests. Since many parents aren't spending very much time educating their kids about ways to practice internet safety, many kids are willingly providing any information that these MySpace-clones request. As a result, the advertisements that are targeted to these children are specific in nature (informed by their interests), and very allurring to the kids.