Online Protection At Home With Increased Homeschooling

Whether you enjoy homeschooling or not, one thing is clear is that web-based threats are real and the risk has become greater with the onset of homeschooling. Since COVID-19 emerged, the number of pupils being homeschooled, schools closed and online threats has dramatically increased.

As part of homeschooling the use of online resources has increased, however, many households just don’t have the high-end cybersecurity solutions in place that businesses have to shelter themselves from such threats. Nevertheless, parents don’t have to be techies or spend pounds for their online protection; thus, this article discusses what can be done to avoid online threats while homeschooling children.

Why is online protection needed while homeschooling?

Take a scenario when you are homeschooling your children and you were still working yourself or fell sick, meaning that you were unable to be with them whilst online or in the evening when they are simply doing homework, are you sure that they would be safe without cyber threats lurking around and waiting to hit them and cause problems? Whether you can answer this or not, your family would still be in danger. Here is why:

Kids are getting savvier about bypassing parental controls both online and offline and they dive into sites without understanding or thinking about the potential dangers
Social media is overwhelmingly full of bad content and rife with trickiness
Malware, ransomware, botnets, and whatnots can infect your computer at any time and steal your personal data as they are getting more sophisticated.
Nude sharing followed by blackmailing is increasingly happening among teens often leading to peer-pressure and suicide.
Cyber predators go online to lure kids
Inappropriate content (pornography, gambling, violence, extremism, etc.) can all be accessed online from websites
If your kids are online unattended which is reality, this is when they could be at the mercy of online threats

How to homeschool safely while being online?

There are two effective ways to protect against cyber threats when at home:-

1) Communicate with your kids to inform them about cyber menaces AND

2) Install parental control software (i.e. a web filter) on all your home devices which can be connected to the internet.

When combined and used effectively, web-based threats and inappropriate content can become a rare thing to worry about.

There are many parental control solutions, but there are a few things you need to know before buying them. Below is an image from an article on the SafeDNS blog about Why and How to use Parental Control Software, which gives you the basic features your web filter should have.

How Can the SafeDNS web filter help you?

SafeDNS provides home users the ability to set a filter on every device that can be connected to the internet (phones, tablets, computers, or routers), based on every user’s age and educational needs (online resources). What’s great, especially for Android users is there aren’t any means to bypass the SafeDNS filtering once its application is installed on your device or the SafeDNS Agent is on your desktop/laptop.

This also applies to schools training students remotely. You can block inappropriate content and other web-based threats from anywhere and have the assurance that they won’t browse resources they ought not to.

For instance, once the SafeDNS filter is installed, you may choose among 61 categories/subjects, and set schedules when you are not around to monitor your children’s or students’ online activities. You can learn more about SafeDNS benefits and features here.