Landon

Landon

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Copyright, Privacy, and Internet safety for children

In our final week of CEdO525 we discussed copyright and Internet safety for children with our groups and wrote about privacy and ethics on the Internet individually.

One of the sites that was recommended to look at in regards to copyright was Creative Commons. I had never heard of the site prior to this class and found some of the information interesting. The website supports legal use of another's work. The site offers six different types of licenses for creators to choose from. Most of them allow a user to change or build upon the material as needed as long as proper credit is given. The licenses also have three different layers to them. The first layer is legal language, the second layer is "human" language, and the third is machine readable.

When looking into the information for Internet safety for children, the FBI provides a guide for parents about Internet Safety. It is very inclusive as it discusses signs to look for that a child might be at risk online, what to do if a parent suspects their child is in contact with a sexual predator, and how to minimize the chances of a child coming into contact with an online exploiter.

This course has been very helpful! I particularly enjoyed learning how to use Google Alerts and creating a website evaluation tool. Researching different Internet learning tools also proved to be valuable. I find it very important to know what resources are available, especially free resources, in the recent happenings in Wisconsin. With threats of deep cuts in state financing, using online tools may become a requirement.