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This team of 6th graders captured 2nd place honors in the 2007 annual ThinkQuest competition for their entry, "Internet Safety, Keeping It Real." Topics covered include predators, cyberbullying and online safety. Although it does lean a little heavy on the side of fear-mongering, this was an excellent effort by a team of kids!

With nearly 13 million online users, the rapidly expanding virtual world Second Life is a risk for children, who could be sexually exploited, U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) said Monday."This Second Life is a new scare, unchartered territory," Wilks said at a news conference Monday with Kirk at the Mt. Prospect Police Department. "It hits home." Kirk said he knew of no cases in which children were targeted by sexual predators on Second Life, but he said he considers the virtual world an emerging danger.

The Virtual Global Taskforce (VGT) is made up of police forces from around the world working together to fight online child abuse. Check out their PSA, "Think You Know Who You are Talking To?"

By mandating schools restrict internet access, CIPA and other federal and state legislation intend to guard students' safety online-but all they may be doing is keeping vital educational technology out of the classroom. No one disputes the need to protect kids from the harm that lurks online. What's at issue is whether or not mandated internet filters are the best way to achieve those safeguards-or whether the filters aren't up to the task and are actually interfering with the educational mission by obstructing use of important Web 2.0 tools.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit that a Texas girl's family filed against MySpace and its parent company, News Corp. The family said MySpace didn't protect young users from sexual predators.The court ruled that the Communications Decency Act of 1996 "bars such lawsuits against Web-based services like MySpace."

What to look out for, what to advise parents about, and how to help students who may be experiencing problems online.

steps to protect children on the Internet

Facebook, the world's second-largest social networking Web site, will add more than 40 safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies. The changes include banning convicted sex offenders from the site, limiting older users' ability to search online for subscribers under 18 and building a task force seeking ways to better verify users' ages and identities.

Four suspects pleaded guilty to raping a Seattle-area girl who later identified two of her attackers on her MySpace page.

Department Hopes to Protect Children Online by Making 'Top Friends' of Them. Police are hoping that children who use MySpace will add the department to their lists of "top friends" to discourage sexual predators from contacting them. The police consider this a "beware of the dog" kind of friendship. But I wonder how many kids would actually do this.

Video game systems are more high tech than ever. They are also more popular than ever before, not only with kids but with the sexual predators searching for young victims.

KINSA has partnered with Nelvana to create a 16-page cyber-safety comic featuring characters from YTV's hit show, Grossology. The original comic takes kids on an adventure into the underworld of crime (and slime!) while reinforcing KINSA's Surf Smart™ principles. The comic will be distributed in POP! Magazine in spring 2008 to over 300,000 students in Canada, and is also available for download here.

Launched in April, the award-winning NetBasics site from New Zealand is composed of 10 highly entertaining flash animations following the travails of the Jones family as they negotiate their way around the Internet. The series includes a collection of good and bad characters in fictional adventures that engage users while they deliver a serious message about the security threats we face every day online.

child abduction

Solutions such as eGuardian could provide greater protection for kids, but at what cost (e.g., market profiling)?

Online safety advocates are urging President-elect Barack Obama to put more resources toward protecting children from crime, harassment and predators on the Web.

Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly has put out a statement to the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act (KIDS), which President George W. Bush signed on Monday (10/13/08) along with the Protect Our Children Act.

Nortel LearniT is an initiative of Nortel Community Relations to prepare teachers, students, and learners of all ages to develop 21st century skills that will provide a basis for their ongoing engagement in learning and personal achievement. Their lesson plans and guides include several lessons on cybersafety, covering topics like spam, hoaxes, cyberbullying, online predation and analyzing web sites to determine validity. The site is translated into multiple languages, including Spanish.

To decrease a child's risk of sexual exploitation in every environment, there are several steps parents and caregivers should take:

According to new research, more than half of parents cite inappropriate people such as strangers or child predators and content such as adult imagery or depicted violence as the biggest online threats they perceive to their children. But it found that only about a third of them know that there are parental control tools available that can help insulate kids from these perceived threats.

Note that this "research" was done by a company that sells security products so the questions about "biggest online threats" may have been slightly skewed.

MySpace says about 90,000 sex offenders have been identified and removed from its huge social networking website. North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper said Tuesday the new figure is nearly double what MySpace officials originally announced last year.