Blog – Latest stories tagged 'e-safety'

Encourage pupils to play their part for a better internet with our 'E-safety Tips' Competition

The next ‘Safer Internet Day’ will be the thirteenth edition of the event and will take place worldwide on Tuesday 9th February 2016. The theme for 'Safer Internet Day 2016' will be 'Play your part for a better internet'.

The day will give us the opportunity to think about the positive uses of technology and the role we can all play to create a better internet. “The theme encourages us to consider what we do online, the way we behave and communicate and how we should always endeavour to be positive and post positive content.

SID 2016 Competion

To celebrate the fantastic work being done through Safer Internet Day activities around the world, we are delighted to be running a competition for schools. To get involved, all your pupils have to do is come up with a positive e-safety tip that can be tweeted during the run-up to and during ‘Safer Internet Day’.

Entries must be a maximum of 140 characters and include the hashtag #esstips

To submit your school entries:

1) Simply Tweet your entries including the hashtag #esstips from your school Twitter account,
or
2) Submit your entries by email to competition@e-safetysupport.com

Entry is open now and schools can enter as many tips as they wish. All entries must be received before midnight on February 8th 2016 to be included in the competition. Please see the competition terms here.

Winners

There will be 3 categories, Best Primary School Tip, Best Secondary School Tip, Best Tip from an Overseas School. Winners will be chosen and announced on Safer Internet Day. Winners will receive one years free Premium Plus membership to E-safety Support for their school.

We are delighted that our partners at Point2Protect have also provided prizes for our winners. Each of the UK category winners will receive a 100 device licence for their school for a year

Entries

The entries have been coming in think and fast.

To see the entries we have received so far, click here.

There is more to e-safety than simply talking to children - by Ian Skeels of Point2Protect

The current standard advice from experts in the field of e-safety is that talking to children and young people is the best protection against the risks they might encounter online. Whether in school or at home, the argument goes, open conversation helps build confidence and resilience.

At Point2Protect, we agree that good communication between adults and children is an essential part of the process, but there are other pieces of the e-safety jigsaw that schools and parents should be considering.

Schools and parents? Yes, to begin with we start from the premise that e-safety isn't solely the responsibility of schools, or parents, or government, or any other group for that matter. E-safety is a societal issue. We should all care about and seek to mitigate the effects that easy access to violent and extreme content could be having on a generation of children. We believe that schools and parents, working together, can start to create community-wide e-safety strategies.

In the aftermath of any terrible safeguarding event, it's not unusual to hear schools say that they had no way of knowing in advance that a child was at risk. Similarly, parents often blame themselves (or the school) for not knowing what their child had been doing for months in that online world where they had been increasingly spending their time. Schools and parents give children these powerful communication devices - laptops, tablets and smartphones, where anyone can access almost any type of content in moments - yet have little idea how they really use them.

So the first part of Point2Protect's process is simple - Understand. In most other areas of a child's life it's accepted that supervision is essential (they are children, after all), but they're frequently let off into the online playground without even basic supervision. At the very least, a responsible adult should know what search terms those children are using, what web sites they're visiting and what apps they use regularly - and this should be across any network, wherever and whenever the child connects a device. Perhaps there should also be some view of who they are communicating with on a regular basis?

Something as simple as being able to see what search terms they've used, on a laptop in school, on the bus with a smartphone, in their bedroom using a tablet, can give a safeguarding officer or parent a powerful insight into the content they're consuming. Many situations that lead to problems will have started with a search for more information. For the school or parent, this insight can guide the conversation and inform the discussion in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

Of course, this approach also enables moderation of the content that's available to younger children. It's essential to stop young children accessing pornography, gambling, violence and other unsuitable types of web content. And again, these rules must be consistently applied across all their devices, wherever they are used. This is the first part of the Point2Protect service.

Once there's a good understanding of this online world that children inhabit, then it's possible to have far more effective conversations and lessons can be planned to tackle the issues that emerge. So the second part of the Point2Protect process is Engage. We're pleased to have partnered with E-Safety Support to support schools and parents in developing the best possible communication strategies.

The third part of our e-safety process is perhaps the most important - Educate. You can't wrap children in cotton wool all their lives. At some point they'll have full access to everything good and bad that the online world has to offer. How they deal with this - the confidence, awareness and resilience that they have developed - will be based on the quality of the education they've received.

At Point2Protect, we offer interactive educational resources that can be used in school or at home, teaching young people about the risks they may encounter and how to deal with them when they do. These resources complement the assembly and lesson plans which are available from E-safety Support that help teachers delve into the various e-safety issues in the classroom.

This simple three step process - Understand, Engage and Educate - is at the heart of Point2Protect's e-safety service. There's a lot more to it than this, of course, but the fundamental aim is to protect the youngest children using device-based filtering, while helping young people develop mature strategies to deal with the risks they may face.

The SWGfL series of live e-safety briefings recommence in September

After a successful 2 year programme of delivering vital e-safety information across the UK, the South West Grid for Learning are now planning a further series of 80 events to run until march 2016.

Online safety is one of those areas of safeguarding that never seems desperately important until things go wrong; only then do a host of authorities appear to point out the massive gaps that have been missed.

The recent Serious Case Review at a North Somerset First School where a member of staff had been systematically abusing children over a period of time clearly identified the glaring gaps in online safeguarding that in hindsight are so obvious but at the time, obviously didn’t register as a cause for concern.

The E-safety Live Briefings are short sharp sessions that aim to provide the most amount of information in the shortest possible time at a local location to you...and they are free?

Who for?

In the broadest sense the sessions are designed for any professional working with children and young people, and certainly not just designated ICT leads in schools. There will be lots in the session for those in Senior Management, those who are accountable for governance, need to steer holistic approaches and formulate strategy as well as practitioners who are keen to extend knowledge and increase effectiveness. Anyone in the Children’s Workforce will benefit from the insight and the testimonials reflect the wide appeal.

Content

There will be content about current technology, latest trends and issues that are emerging, focus on some of the key research that is being carried out and the important findings from it. Guidance on policy and legislative frameworks as well as exploration of tools, techniques and strategies being employed to good effect. There is also signposting to useful sources of support.

The scanning and scrutiny of material in the rapidly changing field of online safety is constant and the briefings are a vital component in efforts to ensure practitioners and policy makers alike are aware and conversant.

Resource Base

The resource base, accessible by every delegate who attends through a password issued to them, reinforces all the headline content of the briefing by giving access to the detailed research, documentation, presentations, legislation and quoted material of any other form from the session itself. This includes media coverage, video clips, hyperlinks and multi-media interactions.

Hosting Opportunity

The UK Safer Internet Centre are looking for organisations who would like to host one of these briefings, and are committed to achieve a broad reach. So urban or rural, North, South East or West, you could put yourself at the centre of learning and change.

To find out more, visit the E-safety Live website