Teaching Internet Safety

As a child of the 80's, I'm sure my parents are grateful that Internet safety wasn't a concern with my sister and I.  The biggest technological dangers we faced were prank-calling the wrong person (Note: Do not answer the phone pretending to be Pizza Hut when Dad's boss calls) or dropping a plugged-in hairdryer into the bathtub.  I think about my young nephews and am fairly terrified by the idea of them going online.  I believe they'll receive adequate supervision and instruction, but will they know how to identify a potential predator, avoid clicking on an ad that will install a virus or, God forbid, deal with cyber-bullying?

Not being a parent myself, I don't know what the best course of action is for any age group.  Certainly, children want some privacy and deserve increasing amounts as they become older and more responsible.  I certainly wouldn't have wanted my parents reading the notes my friends and I passed in grade school.  Harmless as they seem now, a lecture on why it isn't amusing to torment a substitute (when really, it's hilarious!) was something to avoid. 

Some companies now provide games for children of varying ages.  I tried some of these out and found them to be generally useful: 

AT&T's Safety Land (http://www.att.com/Common/images/safety/game.html) presents an online town with several buildings.  Children click on each building and answer a question, which helps the superhero to defeat the bad guy and offers a certificate to completers at the end.  (Do kids now like certificates any more than Gen X'ers did?)  The questions are good, and props to AT&T for showing some multiculturalism and diversity in the hero character, but overall the game is a bit short and is centered mostly around avoiding predators (primarily sexual, although never explicitly stated).  While the game has some good information, it's brevity might mean retention of the information is low, and it only offers education on one facet of internet safety.

Microsoft and the Canadian province of Alberta teamed up to present Bad Guy Patrol (http://www.badguypatrol.ca/).  This site has selections for 5-7 and 8-10 year olds, but the games for each age are very similar.  Each has 4 parts, each hosted by a different member of the Bad Guy Patrol.  Two include trivia questions, one includes idenfication of emoticons, and a fourth uses animals costumed as another species to reinforce the idea that people are not always who they seem online.  The characters are entertaining (a punk porcupine, highbrow owl, semi-creepy buffalo and talkative ram) and the multiple games present a wider range of safety concepts, but they did tend to drag on.  My attention span somewhat outlasts that of a 5 year old and I found myself asking "when is this going to end?"  I can see kids enjoying this game, despite the certificate!

For a little more retro fun, Quia has an Internet Safety Hangman game (http://www.quia.com/hm/40647.html).  It probably isn't the most well-rounded, but it's some entertainment for the few kids out there who might actually play pen-and-paper games when they're bored.  

My favorite were a collection of games from OnguardOnline.gov (http://onguardonline.gov/media/).  These cater more to older kids, teenagers, and even adults, and cover a much broader range of topics, from bullying and predators to spyware, ID theft, and hacking.  Overall, these had the best graphics and most sophisticated concepts.

Games are, of course, no substitute for parental instruction and monitoring, but I'm sure any parent will agree that sometimes their children will pay more attention to someone other than Mom or Dad.