Internet Training for Homeschooling Parents

Image by Atlanta Dahlia Photography

Image Location

Did you know that when you take a picture with your smart phone or tablet, it stamps a location on that picture. It's called "Geotagging".

If you post that picture on the internet in any form, individuals can copy the picture and run it through a program that will tell them the exact address where the photo was taken.

The picture could be posted anywhere: on a website, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, SnapChat, or where ever. The program used to find locations is easily available and widely used.

So, if your student takes a selfie in his/her bedroom, and posts it online, someone just needs to run that picture through the program and in seconds they will have your address. It doesn't matter if the student used a fake profile. The picture will still be linked to your address.

In order to stop this from happening, you need to turn off "Geotagging" in all of your and your students' Smartphones and tablets. Follow this link to an article by "Ubergizmo" about "How to Turn Off Geotagging in Your Android".

Or, if you are using an IPhone, visit "How to Turn Off Geotagging for IPhones and IPads".

Checking Up On Internet Friends

Parents, it pays to be diligent when it comes to keeping your students safe on the internet. Suppose your child has befriended someone on the internet, and something doesn't seem quite right. There are some things you can do to check.

People on the internet are not always who they claim to be. They can use fake names, pictures, and fake friends. If you are concerned, here are some tools you can use to check the individual out a bit.

Geotagging works two ways. Someone can use it to spy on you, and you can use it to spy on someone else. For step-by-step instructions, go to this article about extracting gps coordinates from images written by Alpine Security. Here's the thing, if the other student claims to be in Maryland, and all his/her pictures say "California" you may be looking at a Catfish.

A Catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they aren't online to try to build a relationship with other people. Sometimes it is because they are insecure, but other times it can be malicious.

If you have a phone number for the individual, do a "Reverse Phone Number" look-up to see if the phone is registered to the same name (or a parent's name). You may have to pay for this service. Also, be careful. There are a lot of gimmick services out there that advertise "Reverse Phone Look-up" that may trick you into clicking on something you shouldn't. Do NOT use the site www.reversephonelookup.com. Spokeo is probably the best one we can recommend right now, but you will need to pay for the service, and please be careful not to subscribe to anything you don't want. They all tend to throw up boxes they say you need to click on, but you don't, and they have nothing to do with looking up the number. Instead they end up subscribing you to something you didn't want.

Use "Google Image Search" to see if pictures of the person show up anywhere else online. If they do, and the person has a different name, it is very likely that the individual your student is talking with stole the pictures and is pretending they are pictures of himself/herself. This article from "Popular Mechanics" tells how to Reverse Image Search.

Insist that your student speak with the other person with some kind of visual platform, such as "Zoom", with you present so that you can see the person is real. This will give you a chance to introduce yourself too, which could make someone who is malicious nervous enough to go elsewhere. Individuals who refuse to video chat or chat on the phone after developing a friendship with someone else online generally have something to hide.

Don't be afraid to check messages between your student and other individuals online. Your student may feel like you are invading his/her privacy, but these days, with everything that goes on with the internet, it needs to happen. Sit down with your student and explain that it isn't because you don't trust him/her, but rather, that you don't trust all the unseen "bad guys" out there on the internet.

Following are a couple articles with good information. The first, from "CBS News" outlines some forms of parental controls, in addition to presenting both sides of the parent/child internet controls argument. You will find it at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/should-parents-snoop-on-their-kids-online/. The second one is from the Mayo Clinic, regarding how social media affects Tween and Teen health.

Making Parents More Internet Savvy

This section is for Homeschooling Parents that would like to know more about the internet and its usage.

Given the fact that the internet came into being during most of our lifetimes, it is not surprising that not all of us homeschooling parents are experts in it. In fact, studies show that the average American above age 40 pretty much just knows enough about it to "get by" with the things that they use on the internet regularly.

Yet, the internet has become so much a part of every day life, that it is difficult to get by without it anymore. And, when it comes to homeschool, having some skill with it is becoming a "must".

Since different parents may be at different levels, we are going to start with the basics and go from there. Make sure you check back often as more lessons are added.

The Internet, Browsers, and Search Engines

Think of the internet like a map. Different websites are different cities, and the roads between them are the links between the cities. In the case of the internet, those links can be done through the phone line (which is called "dial up"), DSL (which is a phone line dedicated to internet so it is much faster than sharing with phone service), a cable line (like cable tv), broadcast from towers (this would be Neubeam), or beamed from a Satellite. Any of these can provide you with internet. Some are better than others. But here in Garrett County, in some areas, you may be limited by the fact that there may only be one choice. When you want to see a website, your computer sends a request over the internet "road" to the "city" where the website is living on a computer. (Computers that hold websites on them are called servers. But they are basically computers with special software that lets them send information out over the internet when it is requested.) The server, then responds by sending the website to your computer. It is a good deal more complicated than that, but for the purpose of understanding it, we'll not get that detailed yet.

Computers have to have software to do anything. Software is a program that you place on your computer that tells it how to do whatever the goal is of that software. In other words, if you want to type something, you would download software like Word (which is a word processor.). It is the same for using the internet. The computer cannot just go out on the internet and look for a website. It has to have software to do that. Even if you have the roads (internet service) between your computer and the websites of the world, you can't see them unless you have software that tells the computer how to do retrived a website and show it to you. A Web Browser is software that tells the computer how to get on the internet, ask for things you request there, and display them so you can see them. There are several web browsers, and you only need one of them to get on the internet, but these days people often have more than one because different web browsers may give you different results when you search the internet for something. Web browsers include: Chrome (owned by Google), Firefox (owned by Google), Edge (owned by Microsoft), and Safari. There are more, but these are the main ones. Most computers these days come with a browser already installed, as do smart phones.

You may be interested to know that the information that your browser receives is not the beautiful website you see. Rather, it is a bunch of computer code. Your browser uses that code to "show you" the website. Basically, the way it works is that the browser knows to make things look a specific way based on the code. So, it displays it in a certain way for you to see. That is why some websites may look different in different browsers.

Once you have the internet service and the Browser, you can go online. But how do you find what you are looking for? You have to use a Search Engine. Search Engines are companies that have information about all the websites on the internet in their databases. When you open your browser, (by clicking on it), one or more search engines automatically come up. What you will see is basically a page with a little box where you type in whatever you are looking for. This is called a "search field". The reason a search engine comes up automatically when you open the browser is because different browser companies have deals with different search engines to be partners. And, in some cases, the same company owns both. If you have Chrome, Google Search is going to be the search engine that comes up because Google owns both Chrome and Google Search. But you are not stuck with the search engine that pops up. If you want a different one, you can simply type the name of the search engine in the search box. So, if when you open your browser, you see Google or Bing, but you want Yahoo!, just type Yahoo in the little search bar, and you will get the Yahoo Search Engine instead.

Truth be told, if you are new to the internet you could probably care less about which search engine you are using, so we will save the specifics for later lessons.

Finding the Website You Want

When you type something that you are looking for in the little search box and hit "enter", a list of websites will come up on your computer screen that have something to do with the thing you were searching for. At the top, you will see websites that say "Ad" next to them. And below them are ones that do not say "Ad".

Search Engines list websites in the order that they think will be of most interest to you. Think of every website in the world being listed in order with the ones the Search Engine thinks you most want to see on the top. They use a very complicated system to do this. But, in a nutshell, they try to provide you with the most popular and reputable websites on the list first. But those sites are the ones that do not say "Ad" next to them. They are called "organic" sites, which means that they came up because they were on the search engines list of best sites. But just because the search engine thinks you want the sites it has listed at the top, doesn't mean you really do. You can scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the page numbers to find more websites further down the list. Still, the majority of people only visit sites on the first page.

This is where those websites that say "Ad" come in. You see, search engines make money from advertising. In fact, they make trillions of dollars a year on advertising. Why? Because everyone wants to be at the top of the search engine listing. If there are thousands of websites, do we see a problem? So, search engines will put websites at the top of the listings if they pay for advertising. All of those websites that say "Ad" have paid to be at the top. One very important fact, though, is that not all of them are "Advertisments". Though most are, some could be non-profits, educational websites, or other types of sites. The "Ad" sign just means that they paid to get at the top of the listing.

If you find the websites that you are looking for, all well and good. But if you don't. Try changing the wording of your search in the search box of the search engine. It may give you different sites.

When you are done, just click off your browser with the little "x" in the upper right-hand corner.

Security Facts

Most computer experts tell you to leave your computer online all the time. There is a good reason. Most computer experts are interested in the health of your computer, and what they know is that if you don't have the latest upgrades to software on your computer, your computer may be vulnerable to virus'. Most people don't want to stop what they are doing during the day to let the computer download updates, so it does it automatically during the night.

I am going to tell you something pretty unpopular, though. The fact is, if your computer is online, it can be accessed over the internet even if it is off. That's right, someone can be inside your computer even if it is turned off. This is going to scare you, but it is simply fact. Every website you visit has the ability to know you were at their site. They get your IP address (which is your personal computers numbers) listed as visitors to their site. In fact, they know exactly which pages you viewed and how long you were on each page. Every computer has its own unique numbers so it is known who searched for what, where. Every website has access to that information if they know how to obtain it.

Most of the time, this means absolutely nothing because website owners don't bother to use the information for anything. Other times, they may buy software or services that will allow them to send you ads for their website. But in a few select cases, if you go to a website where you should not have been, the owner of that site can attempt to track you. With your IP address, they can get the address to the location of your computer. And, wait, there's more, if you have a webcam, if they know how to do it, they can spy on you. This sounds like something out of science fiction. But it happens more than you think.

If you have good security software downloaded on your computer, (we recommend Kapersky's), it will try to stop things like that from happening. (This is where the computer automatically downloading the latest version of your computer security software in the middle of the night comes into play, and is an absolute MUST). But there are some cyber criminals that can get around it.

Parents if you have a webcam or your children have a webcam UNPLUG IT WHEN YOU ARE NOT USING IT! You can cover it, but people can still hear through it. If you are on a desktop, it plugs in to the back of the computer, generally. Just follow the chord to where it plugs in. Mark the slit before taking it out. And, pull it out. Put it back in only when you plan to use it.

We generally take our computer off the internet when we are not using internet. This is unpopular, but it is the safest practice. However, you will need to set aside times to update your software. (When it needs done, the computer will generally have a message on it telling you.) Do not ignore the messages that it needs done, expecially if it is security software.

Here are the facts. Many parents think that they are safe from being spyed on because they don't see a reason for it to happen, or they don't think they have anything anyone would want to see. The fact is, if your child, or you, accidently click on a website with a malicious individual who owns it, you could be the next target.

So, should you stop using the internet. No. In this day and age, so much is tied to it that life would be very difficult without it. Just know the facts, and practice safety. Teach your children safety. And, make sure they are doing it.