Blog – Latest stories tagged 'parents'

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.

With many of the headline stories in relation to e-safety largely involving teenagers, it’s easy to forget that children as young as 9 are reporting to have met strangers both online and subsequently offline. Many also claim to have been bothered or upset by something encountered online including sexual images. (Source: Haddon, Leslie; Livingstone, Sonia; and EU Kids Online Network (2012) EU Kids Online: national perspectives)

Further statistics from the Ofcom - Children and parents: media use and attitudes report 2013 indicate that:

While these statistics are worrying enough, we must also remember that ‘internet access’ now comes in many forms, some of which may not be immediately obvious to younger (and indeed older) users. Take for example connecting to other players on a WII game or using an installed App on an iphone or tablet device. This is still ‘internet access’ and therefore the potential risks are inherent too.

Placing security controls on computers and using child friendly search engines are no doubt a great starting point for younger children, but these actions are not guaranteed to filter out all the dangers. Arming students with some basic knowledge at an early age will help to reinforce e-safety awareness for when their natural curiosity inevitably leads them to an online area of possible danger.

Amid all the stories of concern and risk, it’s also worth remembering that the internet does offer a rich environment for information and learning, so its use should be encouraged. As with many things in a child’s education, we must first show them how to do it safely under supervision, before letting them take control.

In the months since the inclusion of e-safety as part of the Ofsted inspection criteria, many schools are beginning to come to terms with the e-safety inspection criteria which includes; having a whole school consistent approach, developing robust and integrated reporting routines, having staff training and responsibilities identified, delivering age appropriate education, having the correct infrastructure, monitoring and evaluation, management of personal data and last but certainly not least, a school e-safety policy.

In the most recent Ofsted ‘Inspecting e-safety in schools’ briefing, they identify key features of good or outstanding practice for e-safety policies as:

Significantly, there is only one indicator of inadequate practice:

It is easy to see why schools could fall into the latter category, not least because the e-safety inspection is a relatively new addition to the Ofsted inspection and may not yet be fully integrated with the other school procedures and policies. Downloading a 'one size fits all' policy template from the internet is a quick fix, but isn’t ideal and indeed, not a satisfactory solution where Ofsted in concerned.

If e-safety issues are global and the associated risks applicable to all young people, why is an off-the-shelf policy inadequate. The answer to this lies with the whole school community involvement. If a policy were aimed at just students in a single year group, then it’s possible that a generic policy could well stand up to interrogation. However, add several more year groups, plus their parents and not forgetting their teachers, governors – the entire school community – and the parameters for the policy become vastly different.

Each school will have a different relationship with its stakeholders – some school may have a locked down IT systems which prevent certain websites within the school, however once outside the school environment, pupils could have unrestricted access. This situation would require a different policy for pupils and parents to those which allow unrestricted (but monitored) access to the internet.

Alternatively, a school may have a defined code of practice about personal social media accounts for teachers, while others may have accounts set up specifically for school use – again in each case, a different policy would be required.

One area which all schools should have in common is the involvement of the students in the creation and implementation of the school e-safety policy – how this is applied however is again down to the individual school.

These highlight just some of the areas where a policy would benefit from being unique to the school – let’s not forget, that there are several more areas from the Ofsted indicators that could also be interpreted differently. With all the possible variables, it becomes clearer why each school requires its own policy, even to the extent that schools sharing the same site could very well require different policies despite their shared location.

On a final note, there is also the issue of a policy being ‘updated’. While the digital landscape is constantly changing and schools are become more e-safety aware, the school policy will need to be adjusted appropriately. There are no hard and fast rules about how frequently this will need to happen, but Ofsted suggest that a good policy should be updated regularly.

If you would like to share your experience about implementing an e-safety policy in your school, we would love to hear from you – simply complete the comment section below.