Spotlight

Last evening, December 12, 2007, I had the pleasure to attend a program sponsored by my local school district about Internet Safety. The speaker was nationally recognized, Katie Koestner from Campus Outreach Services. Her talk not only educated the audience about the pitfalls of today's technology abuses, but scared many of them to go home and toss out all electronic devices!! Only kidding there, but it made me take a serious look at several things and you should too!

• Where is your computer located?
• Does your student have a cell phone with a camera? can it take video? Why?
  
• Where is the cell phone when they go to bed? Where does it charge?
• Have you ever seen the photos on your child's phone? the movies?
• Do you have filtering and monitoring software for your home computer?
• Do you have a laptop that your student uses? Where do they use it?
• Have you ever sat and watched YouTube with your kids? Have them show you their favorite videos.
• You should "Google Yourself and your kids" to see what information is out there on the web.
• Teenagers listen to over 10,500 hours of music by the time they are 16. What is influencing them?

I found out that information your child posts on myspace.com or facebook.com or many of the other social networking sites actually 'becomes the property of the site"! That is why Rupert Murdoch has paid over $550 million for myspace.com - content! If you have a budding artist, songwriter, actor, or writer, and they post their material on their own blog, the company then owns it! There is no payout for their intellectual property, myspace.com just keeps it and can publish it for their own profit.