Student Safety on the Internet

With the internet being used more and more, their is an increasing amount of websites or services that are dangerous for students. Whether it is sites that are promoting poor self-image, self-destructive themes, or are chat rooms where potential web predators may lie. Often students walk into some of these traps without even realizing it. So as future teachers it is our job to become familiar with the tools of the internet and its potential pitfalls so that we mey help our students to learn how to safely use the internet. We can try and develop their critical thinking skills and teach them how to know what is good and what is bad. For lessons we can use tools like webquest that will give them guided use of the internet so that they can learn and develop deeper understanding of the topic and help keep them from the dangers. But it is inevitable that the students are going to be online outside of class, just surfing around, so what we really need to do is educate them as to what these dangers are, how to recognize them, and how to avoid them. To do this though we need to first learn about them and understand how to avoid them. There is our mission now lets do it.