Protection of students in ICT & games

This week's lecture presented us with some fairly confronting ideas as we were introduced to our responsibility for protecting students in the classroom from cyber predators, explicit content and cyber-bullying. This is a very real issue that can, and has, lead to unforeseen tragedies of social exclusion and even suicide.
Technology in the 21st century is a part of children's everyday lives in our society. These days it seems like you're the minority if you don't frequent sites such as youtube and facebook. these can be great sources of entertainment, research and education, and socialisation. But what about when children are not street-smart enough to protect themselves from damaging or explicit content? Who should be monitoring these children? Media coverage has ensured most people are aware of the ramifications associated with cyber-bullying and the explicit content of many many internet sites.Yet there is nothing in the technology that can stop children from visiting these sites.
When devising a learning curriculum that incorporates ICT, there are processes the teacher can undergo to ensure the navigation of sites will not lead to explicit content. this is an idea i have yet to explore hands-on, so im not 100% on how this works, but in my learning journey in becoming a classroom teacher find this to be one of the entities of teaching that is paramount for protecting our students.
It is our duty of care to protect our students, as Greg pointed out, this could be as simple as adequate classroom supervision.

Upon leaving the lecture i felt quite melancholy from witnessing the youtube video of a family's experience of losing their child to suicide as a consequence of cyber-bullying. So it was nice to learn that a focus of the workshop was to be on the construction of games and quizes to use as learning aides in the classroom.
I was feeling a bit silly at the end of what was a long day of back to back classes, so created my example of a quiz based on Aussie comedy. chuckling to myself got me through the final stretch of the day, and i did in-fact grasp the concept of creating the program and believe it would be an effective learning resource in the classroom as it can be directed towards pretty much any learning topic.