ONLINE SAFETY

Mark Bentley Safeguarding and Cybersecurity Manager at edtech charity LGfL-The National Grid for Learning, is passionate about keeping children safe and schools secure. Here Mark shares his views on the Government’s Online Safety Bill.

You might be inclined to agree that the internet – branded the Wild West Web by the NSPCC – has always been a concern for those of you dealing daily with class WhatsApp arguments, Year 8s on Tindr and Grindr or Year 3s on 18-rated games. The good news is that the Government has just published its Online Safety Bill.  The final version is going through parliament as we speak, and the new law is set to change all that for the better. Or will it?

The COVID-19 epidemic has fundamentally changed the way we use the internet. According to Ofcom, we’re spending on average an hour longer on the internet every day than we did in 2018. This has been especially true for children, who’ve relied on video calls and online games and lessons as a way to continue learning, socialising and playing. 

A set of tools for keeping your family safe online and teaching your children how to become better digital citizens.

KidGuard’s mission is to educate and bring awareness to parents about what they need to know about online safety for their children. Here’s a list of guides all about protecting children while using the internet and technology, a great read for parents and educators alike.

How many hours do you spend online? This was a classic question that, not so long ago, was at the heart of any e-safety lessons which took place in a school environment. This question is now awfully outdated because, as a society, we live in an interconnected world whereby we are always at some point in our day connected to this thing we call the Internet. This change in society has progressed at a rate quicker than technology has perhaps progressed, and these changes pose great difficulties for young people as to how they become part of this digital world. For us as educators, we have a fundamental role to play with how we help young people to embrace this digital world in a safe and secure manner.

On Friday 28th October, Twitter will host the Digital Citizenship Summit, a major gathering of organizations, industry, parenting experts, students, and more. The event will bring together new, well-known, and unexpected voices from a wide variety of backgrounds for a fast-paced and energetic mix of presentations, panels, videos, and awards. The day will be live-streamed to a large global audience, and seeks to broaden the appeal and accessibility to digital citizenship and media literacy.

A series of curriculum-linked resources and new teacher training from the education charity Into Film invites teachers and students to explore issues relating to online safety using the magic of the moving image. Created, respectively, for Key Stage 2 (or equivalent), Key Stage 3 and 4, and Key Stage 5, the charity’s Staying Safe Online resource – featuring teachers’ notes and Powerpoint presentations - uses carefully selected films and related activities to help educate young people on how to use technology safely and respectfully, in keeping with the Safer Internet Day 2016 theme ‘Play Your Part for a Better Internet’.

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