You may have read my post early on about K9 internet filtering. K9 is a good resource to use in home computers, but I have recently found out that to put it on your church computers (i.e. business) you need to purchase a license.

You may want to check out OpenDNS. It provides similar internet saftety solutions and is completely free for any setting. I must admit that I have not used this yet. I plan on taking K9 off of one of my church computers and installing OpenDNS on it instead.

Have you had any experience with OpenDNS? Tell us about it.

If you are not screening your volunteers yet, you should be moving toward that process. You can find some sample screening documents here. Family Watchdog is a fantastic resource to find out how many sex offenders live in your area. You can search by state, city, zip code, and even address.

I used this as a tool to show people that our area had more offenders than they thought. For example, the zip code that my churh is in has 138 offenders. You can also get free updates when an offender moves into your area.

You may recall a post of mine back in April on a free internet filter called K-9. Filters are great, but we need to be educated about what is being filtered. Children are so precious that any and every step should be taken to protect them from the dangers of internet predators, pornography and scams.

Besides internet filtering, parents and leaders of Children’s Ministries need to be well educated about what is out there facing kids and how to protect them. That’s were a great website called NetSmartz comes in. NetSmartz is a resource of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. NetSmartz has a parent resource section including free training/education videos, back to school safety checklists and link to a knowledge base called NetSmartz411. It also hosts a kids site for educating children using games, kid-friendly articles, videos and fun characters. This kid-centered site is called Netsmartzkids.

The kid site is a bit busy, but proves to have some valuable tools. This site is a definite resource to pass along to families and kids within our ministry. Please comment below if you have any other sites that are beneficial to educating kids and families about internet safety issues.

There are a ton of internet filters to choose from and they pretty much all cost money. You can choose Safe Eyes, AFO, bsafeonline, and Net Nanny. They will cost you $40-50 and/or a monthly charge. These are all adequate filters and have received good reviews, however, K9 Web Protection is a diamond in the rough. It is completely free and has been downloaded over 1 million times. It offers real time protection and updates and works seamlessly in your existing browser without any extra search bars, plug ins or add ons.

The parent company, Blue Coat makes its money by securing network systems for Fortune 500 companies. They seem genuinely concerned about helping families keep a safe and secure home and that is why they offer K9 Web Protection for free. It uses the exact same database and technology as their commercial system. You can look here for details about what K9 offers.

This program is free for home use and would be a great resource to promote to the parents of your ministry. We use this in my home and only my wife knows the password. This keeps me (and my brother in law who lives with us) accountable and encourages us to live above reproach. It is very easy to check for sites that have been visited via the web-based administration page. It is also impossible to deactivate or uninstall without the main administrator password. I hope it can be of benefit to your home and the homes of families in your ministry.