AFA of PA ACTION ALERT
March 30, 2020
Issue
Advice for Parents to Protect Your Children During This Time
Details
A couple of things that people should be concerned about and watching during this time:
1) STALKING: I wouldn’t be surprised if school districts can collect information on all activity on a home computer when a student is logged into their school Google account.
2) FREE STUFF: There are a lot of free tools that are being offered during this time. It is generally a bad practice to list bad sites. Unfortunately, when parents don’t find a site listed on a “bad site” list then they tend to come to the conclusion that other sites are “good”. (Known bad sites are listed at the bottom.)
3) FILTERS: School districts have internet filters required through the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA). Home networks generally do not have strong enough filters. Get filters ASAP on your home network to protect your children and monitor their activity.
4) SCHOOL ONLINE RESOURCES: Many PA schools use EBSCO and GALE resources, which gives children easy access to pornographic material. Unfortunately, when a student is logged into these databases, it is like a VPN portal and the school’s network filters do NOT work.
Per #2 – Sites with inappropriate material:
EBSCO
GALE
Amaze
Power Library (Many PA schools encourage students to use the Power Library and some school websites even connect directly to PA’s Power Library!)
Sites with material that should be monitored by parents:
BrainPop
Discovery Education
Action Steps
Be watchful! Homeschooling your children and need some encouragement or interested in learning about homeschooling? There will be an online conference on April 18th from 10:00 a.m. till 3:00 p.m. Cost is $20 per household. Here’s the link for more info and to purchase tickets. (NOTE: This is not an AFA of PA conference, but we’re just helping get the word out.)
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