The majority of today was spent on an eSafety update course, at the end of which I will receive accreditation as a digital leader of eSafety for my school.
The day pretty much ran through all of the dangers that present themselves to children when working online – and came with the health warning that the internet is great, but today we are going to scare you.
Teaching children about staying safe online boils down to restricting their online access to sites that you know are safe alongside minimising the risk to them by both educating them of the risks they can be exposed to and letting them know what to do if something does happen that they aren’t comfortable with.
The difficult thing is doing that without completely turning them off using the internet altogether.
The UK National Centre for Protecting Children more commonly known as CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) do a wonderful job in providing materials for schools to use. I’ve presented two of them below.
The first, Lee and Kim, is aimed at children who are between 5 and 7 years old. It’s currently the only short film available by them for such an age range but is very good. I can see this getting a fair bit of use at my school.
Far harder to watch is Exposed. This film is expected to be used with 11-16 year olds, but I do think that it could be used with certain younger children in the right setting and with some strong support if necessary.
The main structure of the day came from an OfSTED report which highlighted good and outstanding features of eSafety provision in schools. Looking down that list worried me as, right now, I’m not sure we are hitting a lot of those areas. I will think more carefully over the next few days and think how to develop this area in school.
Elsewhere, and I don’t intend to dwell on this as I have covered it all before here in 2004 and yesterday, but today was the 19th anniversary of the death of Ayrton Senna.
Today also (almost) marks end of the first third of the year and I’m still blogging!
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