Blog – Latest stories

With the fallout from cyber-bullying and sexting regularly hitting the front pages - unfortunately in most cases when the ultimate price has already been paid – you would have thought it would be easy to engage parents/careers when it comes to trying to combat the issue. However, this is not always the case, and with Ofsted now recommending that parents attend regular e-safety sessions schools are under increasing pressure.

Trust and understanding...
The difficulties arise because parents/carers don’t know what they don’t know. They are, rightly so, trusting of their children and also feel overwhelmed by some of the new technologies that they are using. Many adults turn to the younger generation to help them sort out their own technical problems and believe that they have a lot more knowledge than they themselves do. This can lead them to feeling vunerable and not wanting to appear as though they don’t understand this technical world around them.

It isn’t always that parents/carers don’t want to get involved, but they need help to understand the issues and how they can affect their children. Often, when you have the opportunity to explain these issues further and to explore them in more detail, it’s as though the ‘penny drops’ and you can see them nodding and beginning to recognise some of the behaviours they have seen in their children. Let’s face it, why would parents/carers understand issues such as sexting? This is a whole new way of ‘courting’ that they themselves would never have experienced. If you don’t understand the issues, then you can’t be expected to help, guide and support.

A classic example that highlights a combination of parents’ trusting their children and not understanding the full implications of their online activity took place at a boarding school recently. A pupil rang her mum to say that a friend of hers had put a post on Facebook to invite friends to a party at his house. He had put a picture of the house, full address, directions and description of the street, house everything - so that people could find it.

Her mum immediately rang the school to report the issue, but the response from the parent whose child has posted the invitation was not one of shock/horror that the boy had posted this information on Facebook, but that he had been told he could only invite a few friends and should never have invited more than about six. They totally missed the implication of what he had done!

This kind of story - alongside the fact that much of a child’s online activity will take place outside of school hours, is why schools working to get parents involved in safeguarding their children (and themselves) online - forms a key part of the new e-safety guidelines.

Education, education, education...
Just as parents/carers may be chasing the next new smart phone, children are always on the look out for the next new app to communicate with friends, and it doesn’t take long for an app to go viral. We can’t expect parents to always be on top of this which is why it is important for them to get that information from a third party; someone who can point them in the right direction to get the information they need, who can teach them the new terminologies and tell them where to go if they need help.

Through attending a school-hosted e-safety awareness session for just 1.5 hours, a couple of times a year, parent/carers can learn all they need to know to raise their own awareness and to not feel as though they are miles behind their children’s knowledge. When this is backed up with regular updates and even parent training courses, they will also feel supported when they tackle the topic with their children. After all, a parent with knowledge and understanding, is a parent with power.

Visit our partners page to find out more about the face-to-face sessions available from Fantastict. You can also find out more about the parent engagement resources and online training for parents available from E-safety Support.

It’s time to celebrate ‘Get Safe Online Week’ an annual event aimed at raising awareness of the dangers of online crime and criminals and the simple steps that can be taken to stay safe. There are numerous events taking place across the UK from the 20th to the 26th of October to highlight the potential dangers that anyone regardless of age could face if they are not equipped with the right knowledge and safety tips. In support of this, the ‘Friendly WiFi’ team couldn’t be prouder that we have been asked to contribute to driving awareness of this hugely important event by being this week’s E-Safety Support guest blogger.

Although our online safety initiative is relatively new, having launched officially in Summer 2014, ‘Friendly WiFi’ is a hugely important accreditation scheme which is growing steadily and gaining support from across the educational, retail and hospitality sectors. ‘Friendly WiFi’ is the world’s first scheme to accredit businesses in the UK which have the correct filters in place to block inappropriate material. This makes each ‘Friendly WiFi’ scheme members WiFi services safe and secure for families, children and young people to use.

The online safety and security needs of families and children in the UK is our team’s top priority and we feel very privileged to be working alongside such great online safety advocates, experts and ‘Friendly WiFi’ scheme supporters. Since we began working on the development of ‘Friendly WiFi’ which was designed at the request of the PM, we have had support not only from Government but also from leading charities including the NSPCC, Childnet, The Internet Watch Foundation, online safety expert John Carr and other organisations involved in the safeguarding of children online.

We have a great working partnership with E-safety Support who have been key in introducing us into the educational sector as we move into protecting children online by accrediting WiFi services used in schools and other higher educational venues. The most recent school to join our scheme is Portsmouth Grammar who have recently been accredited as a ‘Friendly WiFi’ venue. We are looking forward to working with them to use our partnership as a case study for other local authorities and their schools.

We are delighted to have been approached by a number of LA’s who use public WiFi within their schools and who this year are planning on implementing and rolling out a technology program called ‘Bring your own device’. This program supports mobile learning and lets pupils move toward personalised, anytime, anywhere learning. As part of BYOD pupils will be encouraged to use their own laptops, tablets and phones whilst on school premises, this highlights the need for restrictions to be imposed on to public Wi-Fi to block some of the worst websites and images found on the Internet to keep children safe online.

Any schools, colleges or businesses wanting to find out more about ‘Friendly WiFi’ can request more information by contacting us via email fw@rdi-online.co.uk alternatively find out more at www.friendlywifi.co.uk.

A few days ago, the word Snappening began to make headlines. A suspected leak of thousands of images of young people had been claimed to have been ‘saved’ from the online app, Snapchat.

According to the report from The Telegraph, hackers accessed around 100,000 private photos and videos of Snapchat users over several years using a third-party service that saves images. Many have then appeared on the 4Chan website. As half of Snapchat’s users are aged between 13 and 17, there is concern many of the images might be of children.

For people of a certain age (or should that be, over a certain age), Snapchat is an enigma – in short, it is a messaging app allowing users to send images to one another to accompany a message on the basis that the image will disappear moments later.

Having recently spent many evenings in the company of someone under that age, the constant click of the electronic shutter aroused my curiosity and I questioned the appeal of using the app. I was told that ‘everyone uses it’ and that was quite simply the main attraction, despite her later admittance that she really couldn’t see the point! There is of course also an element of vanity, why else would it take several attempts to capture the perfect pose for this ‘temporary’ image.

So, when the Snappening first made the headlines, I turned to her to gauge the reaction. Initially there was a little shock (despite knowing that the images could be captured from Snapchat even before the leak), but that soon turned to indifference. It seems that for this particular peer group, only faces make it into the ‘chat’, so there was no concern that anything inappropriate could be leaked – and ‘so what’ if their faces were!

In this case, all of the images have been innocent, but it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see how young people could see the attraction of sharing a fleeting image on the belief that it will only appear for a few seconds before disappearing forever. It seems that they are a little misguided on the power of the Internet and the technology surrounding it. A colleague recently commented “the internet, a hard drive or anything digital leaves a trail! It's like etching in glass, you can smooth it out but if you use a microscope you will see that the image is still embedded into the core of the material like the imperfections in a diamond, invisible to the naked eye”.

So perhaps rather than seeing this as an isolated case only affecting Snapchat, we should be re-visiting the concept of the digital footprint and remind pupils that once something is on ‘The Internet’, be that words or pictures, you lose control. It is also an ideal opportunity to raise the subject of cyber bullying and sexting with pupils who may be using this or similar sites.

For now though, it seems that I am due for more evenings being punctuated with the constant click of the shutter, while the Snapchatting continues until it ceases to be the thing that “everyone” is doing.

If you would like to share your thoughts on this topic, please let us know by using the comments section below