21st Century Sheep » internet safety

CyberSafety for Families

Paul — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 23:14:55 +0000

I’ve been away from the blog for awhile. For the past four months I’ve been filling in as interim principal of the J.P. Knapp Early College High School. It was a great experience but it was exhausting. I’m now back to my normal duties.

Some time ago I wrote some material for the General Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church. The goal was to produce a program that could be used at a local church to train the congregation on internet and cell phone safety issues. The folks at GBOD did a wonderful job designing and implementing the final product. I received my copies this week.

The Content on the CD includes: planning guide, teaching plans, handouts and a 30 minute movie presentation. It is available on Amazon , the Upper Room, or from Cokesbury.

Online safety with Moyock UMC

Paul — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 15:54:02 +0000

This afternoon I’ll be presenting a session on online safety to Moyock United Methodist Church. I’ll be using a new (for me) tool called LiveBinders. This tool lets you organize and share websites in a presentation. So far I like it better than a similar product, JogTheWeb.

The live binder is linked below. The PowerPoint and Internet Safety Agreement are available by joining the Google Group.

Internet Safety

Where the Wild Things Are

Paul — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 01:36:32 +0000

Tomorrow I will be presenting a session on internet safety titled “Where the Wild Things Are” at the Children’s Ministry Forum in Raleigh. I just talked to my brother in Raleigh and he said they are expecting snow in the morning. I’m counting on the roads being clear. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

The presentation itself is on Prezi.com. You can see it here. You are welcome to use it and change it in any way you want. We will be using the book Net Cetera – Chatting with Kids About Being Online. We will also take a look at the Family Safety Agreement.

Children’s Ministry Forum

Paul — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:50:01 +0000

The Children’s Ministries Group at the General Board of Discipleship for the United Methodist Church is planning a Children’s Ministry Forum in Raleigh NC in February of 2010. The title of the forum is “Fill My Cup Lord.”

I have been invited to present and I am looking forward to being there. I will present two worksessions. The tentative topics are:

Where the Wild Things Are – Online Safety for Children

What are the real risks to children online? We will explore dangers and strategies of for teaching children and parents about online safety. Participants will learn practical strategies that can be put to use immediately.

Keeping up the Joneses (and everyone else online)

The President is on YouTube, Oprah is Skyping, and Lance Armstrong is Tweeting. Are you keeping up? What will the next “big thing” be? We will explore new resources and technologies that you can use in your personal life and in children’s ministries.

On a different topic I came across an interesting performance by Raul Midon playing his original song “All the Answers“. He is explores what it means to have immediate access to all the information on the Internet vs. having understanding. I think you will enjoy it.

Facebook and Sunday School

Paul — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:30:31 +0000

This week in Sunday School we were talking about the tendency we sometimes have to compartmentalize our lives. We behave one way at Church, a little differently when we are at work, and still differently when we are hanging around with friends. We may say we have to be mean and tough at work to get the job done. We may say we have to tell the rude jokes when we are with friends so we can fit in.

The conversation followed the expected path for a few minutes with comments such as these. “We should live with integrity and be faithful witnesses wherever we are.” “If we behave one way at church and differently in the community we provide fuel to the naysayers who claim the Church is just a bunch of hypocrites.”

Then someone said “On Facebook you have to be the same to everyone, you don’t get to pretend to be one way with one group and another way with another group. They are all just friends.”

I think there is some truth to that. Especially if you have not customized your privacy settings. The privacy settings will let you control what friends and friends of friends can see. It will even let you set up groups of friends such as “church friends” and “work friends” and have different settings for each group. However, I doubt this is common practice for most casual Facebook users.

I thought about this issue when I setup my page and wondered if I should have a profile for work and a profile for church. I quickly decided that was way too much trouble. I don’t even want to take the time to set up different groups of friends. I then thought I would use linkedin for work related social networking. That too became too much trouble. I settled on letting Facebook be the only social networking site that I regularly update and check.

Some of my work friends may not care about what I’m doing at church, and vice versa, but it is all part of who I am. I do try to always remember my first rule of social networking. “Never post anything anywhere on line that you don’t want EVERYONE to see.”

By the way, Facebook is changing its privacy policies and settings to make it easier to share your information with everyone. Be sure you know what you are doing before you check the new box that says “Share with Everyone.”