Lessons in Letting My Son Use the Computer

He likes Mangas. He likes Pokemon sites.

He doesn't get the fact that people build malware into many of these sites. They look fine to him. Nevermind the fact that Ed and I tell him over and over that he cannot download anything, that we should probably check out each new site to determine its safety.

The Toshiba is still my laptop, for the rare occasion that I need to use software for class that doesn't work on a Mac. Like now, for instance-my final project uses Articulate and Atlas.ti, two programs that are only available for PC. I need to do screen caps tomorrow for the group project storyboard.

Gameteen has been complaining for a little over a week that he doesn't want to leave the laptop, because it will shut down. Ed and I both told him we need to look at the machine, as this is a sign of a virus or malware. He refused. Tonight, he didn't want to give it to me when it did this again, he was upset and said I'd probably be mad at the sites he's been using.

This tells me he downloaded something.

Whatever he downloaded, it shut the machine down. I'm trying to restore from a previous version, but I'm 25 minutes in and it's still trying to repair.

I'm thinking NetNanny goes on the machine before he gets to use it again, because he disobeyed the rule of no downloading.

I saw a 60 Minutes segment tonight on Autism and iPads. It was interesting, in that there are studies that parallel what I wish to explore with computer based curriculum. For a moment, I thought that perhaps getting him an iPad would be good, because he'd be less likely to damage that, and the proliferation of apps to help him would be beneficial.

We shall see, because I'm not sure whether the money I'd use for that might have to go into repairing the Toshiba.

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