Internet Security

Last year at our school, the IT director and I started a series of Internet safety lessons that we teach to each different grade in the school from 6th to 12th grades. We cover topics from evaluating websites for research to Social Networking.  What is always interesting is that the students almost always know more about certain aspects and features of using the Internet than we do, but rarely do they know or even think about anything regarding securing their own personal information and identity.
This week we did a lesson with sixth grade on using Facebook and other social networking websites.  The students were familiar with the workings of Facebook and helped me browse around my own site, but by a show of hands, less than half of them who have an account (which is about 65% of them), had ever visited, to their knowledge, the security section of Facebook to set up the security parameters.  This verified for us that the topic of our lesson was needed, but this is concerning.  My hope is that when students of any age 6-12 grades open a social networking account, that not only parents and adult family visit frequently, but that they also help with talking about and setting security parameters.  However, I visited many of the students' Facebook sites as a "non-friend" to discover that many of them are wide open to view and post. Scary.
We close our presentation telling the students that social networking sites are not bad, but sometimes bad people ruin good things.  They should use Facebook, Skype, Twitter and other social networking sites when their parents allow, but they must be smart about how they use them.  We highly recommend they talk with their parents about the security of their sites and encourage them to visit the security section of whatever site they use. "Go there today!" we say.  Just like everything else in education and working with kids, we know that several will not do anything.  Maybe because they think nothing bad will happen to them, maybe because they just forget in their busy day and minds, or maybe because they are not sure they really understand.  Hopefully, the lesson will get them to think about these issues and someday they will take action to protect themselves.