StaySafe.org and onlinesense.org

StaySafe.org, sponsored by the National Home Security Alliance, offers an Online Teen Safety Guide to help teachers and parents alert teens about online safety. For example, predators will:

• Want to have private conversations with their targets.
• Insist that their online relationships be kept a secret.
• Ask their targets to provide personal information, like their addresses, their full names, or phone numbers.
• Tend to do some stalking online to uncover information about their targets—and then make a show of how much they know.
• Ask their targets a barrage of questions in order to get their targets to release more personal information.
• Try to convince their targets that everything they’re doing, and all the information they’re revealing, is perfectly normal.

For more information, see staysafe.org/teens and/or onlinesense.org.

Reviews by CommonSense Media

Do you need to find out if a software program, website, or learning game is any good? Check out commonsense.org/education, which offers thousands of reviews by members of the nonprofit’s editorial board, and also by teachers.

Reviews by Commonsense.org editors are based on 15 factors which combine to measure the quality of engagement, pedagogy, and support.

You can filter and sort reviews by grade, subject, price, platform, purpose (assessment classroom management, etc.), skill (critical thinking, SEL, etc.), last-rated, rating, and more. You can also filter by keyword such as product name.

You can also use the site for discovery. For example, to find highly rated free software for 4th grade reading and writing, you would select Grade: 4, Subject: English Language Arts, Price: Free, and Sort by: Rating.

The site is free to use.