This summer I'm doing a series on What Parent's Need to Know about *insert some type of online thing here*... because it's not just parents that need to know these things but teachers too AND if there is one thing we all know it's that online stuff changes so often it's hard to keep up (especially when you aren't even using that app/program)!
Today I'm talking about Live Streaming!
To be honest, live streaming isn't something that I'm super familiar with but I bet the students that I teach in middle school or older are. Also, my husband knows about it as apparently it's popular in the gaming community (not that I would classify my husband as a "gamer"). Although, every so often you do hear about it in the news as to how someone live streamed some terrible thing that happened which basically alerted whomever was watching and they in turn alerted authorities.
Anyways, you can download this poster from National Online Safety
To start with there are SO many ways to live stream. You can use Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, and Periscope are some of the bigger ones.
You can't edit your live stream... it's like when a news broadcaster goes live... hopefully they already kind of know what they are going to say and do because you can't undo or change something once it's happened. Also, since it's live you can't preview what's going to happen. So if you are trying to protect your children from certain language or videos it would be harder to do if they are watching live streams.
Like anything on the internet once you put something out there it could be there forever. You may eventually delete that video you live streamed (or the app may automatically delete it after a certain amount of time) but that doesn't stop people from recording it or taking screen shots.
Clues can be gathered from live streams as to where your child may be. Is there a school, mall, or street names in the background? Even something like a park could be identifiable if people know the general area that a live streamer lives. So be careful where you film. You could also let it slip that after the live stream is over you are heading to xyz mall not thinking about that you are giving your location away.
Generally just be aware of what your kids are doing in life and online. It can be a scary place out there and we want to protect these kids from it as much as possible.
Last week I talked about a live streaming app called Twitch.
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