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11/12/2020 0 Comments A warning to parents who will be sending their child to school in 2021 with a new laptop It's that time of year again - when many parents will be going through the stress of purchasing and setting up technology for their child for the new school year.
The BYO policy applicable for many schools allows parents to choose to purchase either a Windows or Apple laptop for their child. Sometimes the school purchases and sets up the device on behalf of the parent. A warning if you are one of these parents. Before you hand over the new laptop to your child, consider that this laptop could open up a world of inappropriate content to your child if not set up correctly. There are some important things be aware of and to check - even if the school has set up the computer for you.
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 It's that time of year again, where so many parents are having to put on their 'IT' hat and set up devices for the upcoming school year.
If the device that you are setting up for your child is an iPad or iPhone, there is a list of things that you need to consider when setting up these devices. We have put pen to paper (or fingers to the keyboard) and written up this list for you. Select the button below to view this checklist.  With the school holidays and children spending lots of time on devices, I have assisted several parents lately with setting up Screen Time for the Apple devices that the children use.
One of these parents contacted me after we had established the Screen Time controls to let me know that her 11yo daughter was somehow circumventing the controls and finding ways of using the Messages app well beyond the time limit that had been set. Unfortunately, clever kids will always find a way. They are experts at Googling, and will find any online 'hacks' that have been shared. In fact, the most popular article on this iTandCoffee blog is one titled "How your Kids can by-pass the Ask-to-Buy requirement of Family Sharing" - it is read hundreds of times a week, I suspect by more children than adults! So, how did this child get around the limits that Mum had put in place for the Messages app? 22/3/2020 0 Comments How to ensure your child can't see inappropriate content in Google Search - especially on a school-provided computer With so many children schooling from home at the moment - and therefore on their computers for many more hours of the day - it is important to ensure that they cannot access - either deliberately or accidentally - inappropriate content, particularly through Google searches and Google Images.
Many school-provided computers will not allow you to set up parental controls, especially in Google Chrome. But you can at least set up something called SafeSearch. SafeSearch stops inappropriate content from being presented to children when they do a Google search. Here are the steps involved in setting up Google's SafeSearch:  When presenting the 'Keeping Kids Safe on the iPad and iPhone' information session at a local school last week, I briefly discussed an option that can offer household-wide protection for ANY devices connected to home's internet - that of using a router that provides Parental Control Capabilities.
After the session, I sent a list of topical articles to the parents who attended that session - which included a handy article about options for such Parental Control routers. I am including that particular article here for all other parents who subscribe to the iTandCoffee newsletter.  As many of you will already know, the Screen Time feature introduced with iOS 12 in September 2019 provides some great parental controls for controlling and monitoring a child's use of their iPad and iPhone.
We recently included an article about how App Limits (time limits that you set to restrict how long a child can spend each day on certain apps or categories of apps) can be customised by day of week. With the arrival of iOS 12.2 on March 26, Apple has also added this 'customise by day of week' feature to the Downtime aspect of Screen Time.  Apple has a great set of parental controls built in to the Mac. These controls allow you to restrict adult web content, set time restrictions on when and how long the child can use the Mac, and more.
As we have talked about in a previous blog article, it is essential to ensure that any Mac your child uses has two separate 'user accounts' - one for you as the parent (the Administrator) and another for the child/children. If your child's account is currently the only user account on the Mac, then you can't set up any parental controls. You need to resolve this first by setting up a 'parent/administrator' user account. This account can then be used to manage any other account on the Mac - including resetting or passwords if this is necessary. We have recorded a couple of tutorials on how to set up a separate accounts for the parent or child, and then how to set up the parental controls for the child's account. 15/9/2018 0 Comments Here's how you can stop your child from changing their device password (and recording their fingerprint on your own)!
One of the frustrations I hear from parents all the time is that they wish they could stop their child from changing the passcode on the child's iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.
Not only does it prevent the parent from doing any 'spot checks' of the child's usage of the device, but we regularly deal with situations where the child changes the passcode to keep Mum and Dad out, and then forgets the passcode! This means the device has to be completely wiped, which may result in the loss of photos, app data and more.  At a recent Keeping Kids Safe on the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch information session run for parents at a local school, one of the parents asked if parental controls can be set up on an Android device. For those of you with such devices (or with kids using these devices), here are some articles that discuss how to set up parental controls on these devices. Related Handy Hints and Articles
3/6/2017 0 Comments Some answers to questions from parents about Clash of Clans, Minecraft, Youtube, Netflix and other apps that kids use During term 2 of 2017, iTandCoffee is running free school information sessions for parents. These sessions are on the topic "Keeping Kids Safe on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch".
We look at the specifics of how to use the in-build parental controls on these devices to restrict what kids can do and see. Each time we run this session, there are questions that arise about specific apps that kids are using. Below are some answers to some of these questions. (Thanks to the parents who have turned up for these sessions!) |
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