The White Hatter

This week we had a presentation for our Middle School student body on personal protection and internet safety. The presentation was done by Darren Laur, a staff sergeant in the Victoria Police Department and a specialist in ‘Internet and Social Media Safety’.  Darren is also known as a “White Hatter”. A White Hatter is a computer hacker intended to improve security.  Darren came into our gym wearing his white hat and he uses the persona of the “White Hatter” to convey a real life and dynamic talk to his audience. Darren is a master at knowing the secrets of creepers, cappers, stalkers, RATs, cramming and sextortionists. He conveys real solutions for our youth to not only be safe and but also continue all the positive things that they are doing online.  His talk hit on the pillars of the good digital citizenship curriculum that our Middle School initiated this year.

Darren also led an evening session for our parent community. Darren was able to convey good strategies for parents in dealing with their children and technology. His presentation offered sound advice for device management, social networking pitfalls and creating healthy home environments.

Darren taught parents a four step approach helping their children. The steps include:

A) Good supervision of child device use by implementing monitoring software. Darren offered several good sources for that like www.spectorsoft.com

B) Good participation with their children on devices and internet, www.grovo.com has videos to help parents

C) Get to know the language of social networks and texting, www.netlingo.com is a site that can aid parents

D) Set boundaries for children around device use, device location, and taking devices out of the bedroom.

Darren has a lot of good resources for parents listed on his blog site, check it out at: http://thedigitalsheepdog.ca/    (just click on the resources tab)

Here at Langley Christian School, we believe that the school and home have to work together to accomplish our goal of creating good digital citizenship in our students.

If you were able to attend the Partnering with Parents Evening session with Darren, I would love to hear what you thought of the workshop. Comment below or send me an email!

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2 thoughts on “The White Hatter

  1. We attended the evening session with Darren Laur. It was an excellent presentation, very informative and also entertaining. Darren is a very dynamic speaker and is able to keep his audience engaged. We took away a number of tips to help our kids stay safe on the internet as well as tips for our own internet use. I would encourage LCS to also bring this seminar to the high school and open it up to the rest of the LCS parents. thanks for organizing this event.

    • thanks Bernie, as it worked out, Darren was able to do the High School presentation the afternoon after he did the Middle School morning presentation.

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