Online Safety for Kids and Parents

February 5th, 2010
by Julia

Kids are using all kinds of platforms and tools to communicate and connect online:  social networks, photo and video sharing sites, IM, email, blogs.  But is your computer wiz kid whizzing around the web safely?  Net Cetera: Chatting with Kids About Being Online is a new free guide from OnGuardOnline.gov that helps parents, teachers, and other mentors navigate this landscape and start the conversation with kids about living their lives online.  It’s available in Spanish at AlertaenLínea.gov.

Since the booklet’s release in October 2009, schools, PTAs, police departments, and libraries across the country have ordered over a million copies of Net Cetera to use in their online safety programs.  There are lots of ways you can share the guide with your community, too.  Here are just a few:

• Order free copies for friends and family, or for a school, scout troop, or soccer team.  Hand them out at a PTA meeting, or pass them on to teachers in time for parent-teacher conferences.  Visit bulkorder.ftc.gov to order as many free copies as you can use.
• Grab the Net Cetera button from OnGuardOnline.gov to use on your own website.
• Include information from the guide in your blog or newsletter, or send it to your list serv.
• Co-brand it with OnGuardOnline.gov – there’s even space on the back for a sticker with your organization’s logo or seal.

Net Cetera is in the public domain.

Have other ideas for outreach?  Leave them in the comments!  And if you’ve used the guide, let us know.

Tags: children, community outreach, computers, internet, kids, outreach

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under For Kids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.