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Providing A Safe Surfing Environment

© Cheryl Lewis

Allowing your child to surf the Internet is not an easy decision for many parents. There are a great many parents who feel the Internet is nothing but a playground for people to prey on children. For those of us who have some experience with the Internet we know this does not have to be the case. There are some truly wonderful sites out there for kids. Then again there are sites that lure you in only to shock your eyeballs out of socket. I was helping a friend with a search for Beanie Babies and we innocently clicked on a site that came up in a search. We did not find Beanie Babies, well at least not the kind we were expecting.

That was my first experience with this sort of thing. While it was shocking, it was also educational for me. It taught me that I must be diligent in protecting my innocent children. I knew that in order for my kids to be online there must be some type of protection in place so that they did not enter a site like this one. This experience occurred shortly after I was online and thankfully I hadn't let my kids loose online yet.

At the time I had AOL, which provides some wonderful tools for parents. I set my parental controls and then tested them heartily. I wanted to be sure that my kids weren't exposed to adults only sites. This led me to wonder what parents who do not have AOL do. I decided to find out.

What I found was a neat little tool built in to Windows called the Content Advisor. The Content Advisor was created to help control access to the Internet within your home.

To get to this tool you can go to your Start menu, then Settings, the Control Panel. Once you have the control panel onscreen click on Internet Options. This will bring up the Internet Properties screen. You will notice several tabs at the top of the Internet Properties screen. You will need to go to the Content tab and click. The Content Advisor should be listed as the first option. Click on Enable. You will get another screen with several different tabs but the Rating tab is the one that appears when the screen opens.

It will list Language, Nudity, Sex and Violence. For each of these categories you will be able to select a level of acceptance. To choose that level you will use the mouse on the slider bar on the screen. When you select a level you will get a description in the Description box that tells you what kind of content you can expect. Once you determine your level of ratings be sure to click OK in order to put them to work.

The copyright of the article Providing A Safe Surfing Environment in Teaching Computer Skills is owned by Cheryl Lewis. Permission to republish Providing A Safe Surfing Environment in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.