More Safety with AOL’s Safety Toolbar

There used to be a time when all parents had to worry about was where their kid is at a specific time. Then, it became what one’s kids were watching on TV. Now, of course, this worry extends to where the kids go online.

Concerns for online safety have led to various types of parental control on the Net. The article Parental Controls for your New Computer explains and provides links to the different types of parental control. However, if one is looking for an alternative web-based parental control, AOL offers its AOL Safety Toolbar.

What is the AOL Safety Toolbar?

As its name implies, the AOL Safety Toolbar is perfect for parents who want to keep a closer eye on where their children go online. It’s a free web filtering toolbar that blocks inappropriate content. Moreover, when one does a search using the toolbar, the search results are designed to be family-friendly.

Features

The AOL Safety Toolbar also boasts of filters that actually evaluate sites that were recently posted. It has two filtering modes, strict and moderate, which allows the user to customize the settings and make up their own list of blocked sites. If you’d like your search to reflect only family-friendly results, then you can use the family-friendly search box found in the toolbar.

The AOL Safety Toolbar allows the parent to customize the browsing and monitoring experience. One other feature of this toolbar is that, aside from the usual blocking mode, it also has a warning mode. The parent is allowed to select either mode. Should the parent choose the blocking mode, a child who finds an inappropriate page on the web will receive a warning saying that the site is inappropriate for them. The child may then choose to continue viewing the site or not. This specific feature helps build in the child a sense of responsibility and maturity in viewing Internet content. If the blocking mode is chosen, however, the child is automatically blocked from websites that the parent deems inappropriate. Therefore, choice of either mode is also dependent on the parents’ objectives as well as the child’s maturity.

The AOL Safety Toolbar works on Internet Explorer and Firefox. Unfortunately, however, Google Chrome doesn’t support it.

Reports

The toolbar also provides the parents a report of sites visited, blocked and warned sites, so that parents can more effectively monitor their child’s Internet activity. Reports may either be seen from the toolbar itself or sent to one’s email. In fact, these reports need not only be seen as a monitoring tool, but a teaching tool, in the sense that one can use the data in the report to discuss issues such as critical and digital literacy with one’s child.

As an alternative parental control/web browsing tool, the AOL Safety Toolbar has a lot to offer. It allows the parents the power to customize according to their family’s needs, gives detailed feedback on the family’s web activity, and it’s free. You may check out and download the AOL Safety Toolbar from this site->http://safetytoolbar.aol.com/.

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