Internet Safety

The resources online that educate about internet safety were fascinating and eye-opening to me. I though I had a pretty good idea about what I needed to do to keep myself safe on the internet, but I really didn't have a truly solid idea until now.
I learned that someone only needs a few pieces of personal information to be able to either locate you or steal your identity. Keeping your birthday (especially year), place of birth and home address safe are of utmost importance. There are also lots of resources to help prevent and work through pornography, specifically on lds.org. There are also several sights online that give you access to controlled internet use such as the k9 internet filter.
Besides protecting yourself against identity theft, there is also the danger of keeping yourself safe online in relation to your healthy sense of self and reality. The videos from Frontline in our resources were a little scary to me in their reality of how much teenagers are sucked into the internet. I was disappointed and even outraged when some of the parents in the video didn't seem to be making an effort to have more face-time with their children or were "supporting" them by giving them the freedom to post provocative pictures.
Though the sites will be different when I'm a parent and the technology is almost impossible to imagine, the ideas will still be the same and so I have become a lot more solid in the things I want to do as a parent to protect and educate my children and students. For my children, I'm going to make sure I spend face-to-face time with them everyday, and have a good talk with them at least every few days. This is helpful because of Family Home Evening and the practice of eating dinner together. I also want to have a small portion of the week, maybe Saturday mornings, where we spend time as a family with no technological distractions so it can be more appreciated and put in perspective when used again.
As a teacher, this gets trickier but I'm definitely going to have this in mind when putting together my assignments and evaluations, such as tests.
I feel there should be a medium between education and encouragement of technology, as well as monitoring and control. Kids want structure, but they also want to be understood and so we shouldn't make them feel ashamed. We just need to teach them, even just a little in the classroom because it may be the only place they get that kind of instruction.      
I talked to my older sister about some of these basic principles about not revealing too much information about herself online, and also how to protect her daughter who is almost one year old. Although my niece is still pretty young, I gave my sister some general advice about things to look out for as her daughter gets older because technology exposure starts at younger and younger ages. Some of the things I told her she knew (like not to put online when you're going to be out of town) but she didn't realize how just a few bits of information can result in identity theft. She was also interested in learning more about pornography prevention, which I hadn't focused on much until she asked me about it. Together we explored different options. It felt really cool to inform my older sister about things that could help her, and it was also neat to feel more part of my niece's life even though we live so far away.