Tips to help protect your kids while they are online

1. Encourage your kids to share their internet experiences with you.  Surf the internet with your children.  (Maybe put the computer in a common area of the home)
2. Let your kids know, if they feel nervous about anything online they should let you know.
3. Infom your kids not to give out your address, or any other personal information.
4. Teach your kids that the difference between right and wrong is hte same on the interne as it is in real life.
5. Teach you kids to respect others online.  Rules for good behaviour don’t change just because they’re on a computer.
6. Teach your kids that not everything they read or see online is true.  Encourage them to ask you if they’re not sure.
7. Control your childrens online activity with advanced internet software.  Parental controls can help you filter out harmful content, monitor the sites you child visits, and find out what they do there. 

Using Windows Vista’s Parental Controls

• User accounts

1. Create separate user account for each of your children.
2. After you create the account to go that account and select ‘Setup Parental Controls’
3. Select your child’s account that you want to monitor
4. You must select ‘On, enforce current settings’

Some of the things you can do with parental controls in Vista

• Control allowed websites, downloads and other use (web filtering)
• Set time limits for your children
• Control what kind of games your child can play.
• Allow and block specific programs.

Control allowed websites, downloads and other use (web filtering)

You can either block some websites or content or allow all websites and content

You only allow websites which are on the allow list that you create

Web restriction levels are as follows: High, Medium, None, Custom

You can block File downloads

Time Limits: By enabling time limits, you can set the times where your child can use that computer.

Games: Control PC gaming by allowing or disallowing different types of games.
See ESRB.ORG for ratings

Allow or block specific programs on the computer (IM, media players etc.)

Get Activity reports delivered to you by Vista.

For more informaton on setting up Microsoft Windows Vista’s Parental Control visiti Microsoft.com