As parents, it’s a bit challenging to monitor our children on a 24/7 basis, and keeping them safe online can prove to be much tougher. In a Consumer Reports article published on their website: one-third of the 20 million minors using social media websites were 13 years old and below. Most of these young users were younger than 10 years old, and most of their accounts weren’t supervised by their parents. Sadly, over 1 million of these kids were threatened, harassed, or subjected to other forms of cyber-bullying. Clearly, these defeats COPPA’s (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) purpose of protecting a child’s right against inappropriate content online.  

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COPPA Changes
With today’s technology making it easy to get online and do almost anything imaginable, keeping your children safe from danger is more important than ever. There’s a ton of devices that allow kids of all ages to access social media sites from their mobile phones, including the popular Facebook. These devices range from iPhones and Androids to iPads, Kindles and Surface. It can be a dangerous world out there, especially for unsuspecting children if access is not monitored and restricted.

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Just as computers and laptops have finally become incorporated into classrooms nationwide, another familiar technological trend is starting to creep into school—the tablet.

“Wow—Cool!”
Everyone seems to agree that tablets can be effective tools for learning in class. One tablet can store more information than a complete library of textbooks, and not just text. Enhanced graphics and illustrations, plus highly interactive lesson activities are more engaging to students than reading from textbooks, making the tablet ideal for classroom teaching.

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Technology plays a key role in the classroom today. Gone are the days when teachers used only flash cards and writing worksheets to teach alphabets, numbers and other basics to students. Interactive single touch and multi-touch screens, interactive white boards, tablets and a wide variety of educational applications on mobile devices are now available to the early educator.

A paper published by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) in 2012 pointed out that computer use supported and increased the social, cognitive, literacy, language, writing and mathematical skills of young children. Children learned collaboration and problem solving as they shared information with each other while exploring technology in groups. There was an increase in their visual memory, visual motor coordination and mathematical concepts like number recognition, sorting and counting.

However, it is important to note that technology can be useful only when:

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