Parental Software to help Beat The Cyberbully

Last week we were on Pearl FM as we are every week. Tune in! It’s 102FM and is a fabulous initiative set up by Jeff Price and Nick Watson. The radio station is dedicated to children and also the mums (and dads), 10am-1pm is their time and a whole variety of topics are covered. Our slot is now 10am-11am with Jeff Price and Friends and we are honoured to be working with such a great initiative.

Our subject matter and focus last week was the parents. Beat The Cyberbully caters to parents and educators as much as the children and we have found that in reality, it’s the parents who are falling further and further behind and therefore have the most questions. On air we covered off a number of pointers (check our our Twitter feed for those) and we also spent a bit of time on monitoring software. We make it quite clear that monitoring software is just a PART of a comprehensive approach to keeping kids safer online, it’s not a magic button solution.

Parental Software for monitoring

We did some research and reading to see what would be useful to parents in terms of software. The starting point should be to increase your own level of understanding around the whole subject area. But after that, you may well want to look into some software. There were two suppliers that consistently got good reviews across the board and below is a little bit more about each. These software are for Desktops and laptops and next week we will do the same again for software you can use on mobiles and tablets to do the kind of snooping and monitoring you need to be doing as a parent.

Net Nanny

First up is Net Nanny, this was the software that came out on top on numerous polls and quite rightly lays claim to being the number 1 rated parental control software. Check out their site – www.netnanny.com for a whole load of information that will help you see exactly what the software does. Net Nanny gets rated very highly for its support, so if you have any questions, they are sure to answer and guide you as much as possible. At the time of writing this blog post, there is even a discounted rate, that could save you a few dollars.

WebWatcher

Close on the heels of Net Nanny comes Web Watcher. The difference between them on a scale of 1-10 is about 0.22 so it will be a matter of personal preference to most families. As you would expect, they also get rated very highly across the board and especially on customers service and support. They have a Live chat function on their site, just like we do, so if you have any questions, get over there – www.webwatcher.com right now.

These are just two of the many options out there. For those of you that would like to do some further research, we found this comparison site to be very good in helping us collate all the other information we found about the various software. The site is called Top 10 Reviews and the page you want is here –  Parental Software Reviews