What you need to know about your children emailing and chatting online

1 month ago 01st Oct 10:27

Email, an abbreviation of electronic-mail, can seem very mystical and confusing but it's one of the most powerful tools on the internet. Even people who don't use web sites are likely to have used email at some time in their lives.

With email you can write and send a letter and it can arrive in your recipient's mailbox in a matter of seconds. You can of course send text, but you can also send pictures, videos and all other computer files via email.

As long as you know someone's email address, it's possible to send that person an email. As long as someone knows your email address, that person can send you an email too.

Email is very important because it allows children to communicate with their friends, their teachers and people across the world from their computers.

Some schools let children email in their homework and some run twinning schemes with other schools across the world, encouraging children to send emails to each other about their lives.

While children rarely write letters any more, email is a wonderful opportunity to promote letter writing and the importance of literacy. This is especially important when children are emailing internationally with people who won't necessarily understand abbreviated (shortened) or colloquial (slang) English.

Message boards, forums or newsgroups are very much like email. The difference is that instead of sending to an individual you send your message to the message board for everyone to read.

More about What you need to know about your children emailing and chatting online on page 2