Blog – Latest stories tagged 'e-safety'

As the Easter break began for many schools across the UK, Ofsted released their latest version of the 'Inspecting e-safety in schools' briefing document.

In the main, the inspection criteria remained unchanged - the only exception being an amendment to the key features of good and outstanding practice for management of personal data.

This section now reads:

• The impact level of personal data is understood and data is managed securely and in accordance with the statutory requirements of the Data Protection Act 1998.
• Any professional communications that utilise technology between the school and pupils/students, their families or external agencies should:
  

  take place within clear and explicit professional boundaries
  be transparent and open to scrutiny
  not share any personal information with a child or young person.

There is, however, now more information about the reason why e-safety is such an important issue to face in schools, notably the change in device ownership demonstrating the decline in mobile phones amongst young people, in favour of tablet devices. This could be indicative of how young people are using technology - while school work remains the top online activity for UK youth, they are also playing games, viewing TV shows and films, downloading music and, of course, interacting on social media sites.

Figures quoted in the report recognise the rise in usage of social media sites among young people, with the transition between primary and secondary education apparently being a trigger. 28% of young people have a Facebook account as they leave primary school, but this rises to 59% for 11-12 year olds.

Further data provides evidence that parents are now more likely to talk to their children about online activity. 83% of parents trust their children to use the internet safely.

The subject of online personalised advertising is raised for the first time in this edition, with 42% of 12-15 year olds stating that they were not aware that websites could use their information in that way. A definition of this will be added to the E-safety Support Knowledge Base.

As ever, at E-safety Support, we will review the resources available from our website against the latest Ofsted briefing and will update the material as necessary. Members will be advised about updated resources via the Members Dashboard.

As educators, one of our key roles is to engage parents in their child’s education. In addition to conventional parents’ evenings, reports and newsletters why not draw on what we do best – teaching – and get parents back into the classroom as students?

A recent workshop at a small rural first school in Staffordshire is a prime example of how powerful this method of engagement can be. St Leonard’s First School headteacher Julie Lane was keen to promote the use of smart technology to enhance learning, and approached us with the idea of hosting a workshop to help parents to ensure their children make the most of their iPads and tablets at home while staying safe online.

The result was an evening course that covered how to manage tablets and set up different restrictions to make them more secure for children to use, as well as exploring various free apps to encourage youngsters in educational use of their tablets and iPads.

In addition to providing parents with peace of mind that they can ensure their children stay safe online we wanted to make the session fun and interactive. We explored how to make puppet shows on the iPads and each group of parents produced their own little show about a Princess called Prudence and her handsome knight, Kevin! I wanted to show parents how easily their children can create exciting multimedia projects and use the iPad for learning as well as for games. We also explored augmented reality using children's own drawings and brought their artwork alive with video explanations from the children themselves.

The feedback from the session has been great – the school reports parents commenting on how useful they found the experience, and has gone on to set up a regular ICT evening club that is attended not only by parents but members of the wider community, as well as including ICT tips and app reviews in its newsletter.

Why seek to constantly reinvent the wheel when often a back to basics approach, focusing on the skills we have as teachers, can have the biggest impact?

For more ideas on how to engage parents in e-safety matters, take a look at the E-safety Support Parent Pack or if you are interested in running a parents’ workshop on e-safety, iPad skills or a host of other topics at your school? Contact Fantastict on 0800 030 5241. Don't forget, all E-safety Support Members qualify for a free needs analysis and Premium and Premium Plus members can also claim discount of Fantastict courses.

The Digital Leader scheme came out of an idea from a network manager’s course that I attended. I saw it as having potential to both assist me in my role and at the same time provide a fantastic opportunity for the interested students who volunteered to take part.

So, during our annual 'Activities Fair' I set up my stall with sign up slips to express interest, a few nice posters and some hand-outs and decided to test the interest of Year 8. My plan was to start small with just eight or ten students, who could do the job until Year 10. Next year I could take on another group from Year 8 …and the following year another. After Year 10 students would finish to concentrate on Year 11 exams. So that the total number of Digital Leaders in school would grow to a total of roughly 24 to 30 students from Years 8, 9 and 10.

The outcome of the exhibition was that I might have ‘oversold’ it with almost half of the 280 strong year group signed up. So then I had the dilemma of whittling these down to just a few.

Using our VLE, I decided to get those signed up to reply to me via internal email with a sentence or two on each of three questions:

Most didn’t reply, one or two were silly, some had obviously not ‘got it’ and I soon quite easily came to ten students.

Our first Digital Leaders ‘mission’ is now out of the way, which was specifically to engage parents in Safer Internet day a couple of weeks ago. We invited in parents for two possible sessions, one in the afternoon just before school finished to attract parents who might ordinarily pick their kids up from school and a second session later in the evening. Parents booked into each session online. The team prepared Parent Packs (of which 80% was material taken from the resources available to us by subscribing to E-safety Support. The value of this content was very easily offset in just one go if I had to account for the time that it would have taken me to produce these resources myself). They also rehearsed little bits of interjection into the presentation where they would offer information and personal experiences to support facts outlined in the PowerPoint.

These talks were a great success and the feedback we collected was extremely positive. We concentrated on giving parents the most practical advice, information, and resources that we could so that they could actually all go away and do something straight away to help their own particular e-safety scenario at home.

We are currently on a little one week special project ‘break’ to design a pin badge for ourselves as Digital Leaders, which they will be allowed to wear on their blazers. The ‘team’ have had a couple of short lessons in how the school’s wired and wireless networks are put together involving tours of server rooms and comms cabinets on the site.

This week we are going to split into two groups, one starting to do some basic Python coding and another in looking at supporting some of the technology that we already use in classroom environments.

Over the coming weeks and months, we will be telling you more about the Digital Leaders projects and how the students are taking a lead role in e-safety awareness around the school.

To find out about the inspiration for the project, click here.