At Childnet we visit schools every day, hearing about what young people are up to online and what key online safety issues that face them on a daily basis. The websites, games, apps, social networks that young people use change on a daily basis, and it can be tricky to stay on top of what they’re using. As educators, it can be challenging to keep online safety advice current and fresh and avoid it being repetitive. Just as the internet keeps coming up with new ideas about how to engage us on our smartphones, we, as educators, also need to find ways to keep esafety fresh and exciting whilst staying on top of the latest advice. How then can we keep young people engaged? Well, we’ve been inspired by a few schools recently and we thought we’d share some of their wisdom…
- Make sure your school has a robust system in place to log any e-safety incidents that may occur.
We were in a school recently which reminded their staff about how to log e-safety incidents by having blank copies of the incident form in the staff room. This was a helpful reminder to teachers if they ever needed to fill one out.
- Seize opportunities around the school to remind students about how to stay safe online.
In the same way that technology is a key part of our daily routine, messages about how to stay safe online needs to be part of a young person’s routine every day at school. You can subtly remind your students about e-safety by having wall displays in the corridors, safety messages on your school’s VLE or in the newsletter and a great place is your school’s Twitter feed to really make sure the messages are getting through.
- Peer to peer learning
If you think your students have heard the internet safety assembly from you one too many times, why not delegate this task to other pupils in your school? The Childnet Digital Leaders programme is a great and empowering way to educate your students about how to be leaders in their school community and in turn, educate everyone else in the school about internet safety. By choosing a team of dedicated and enthusiastic Digital Leaders they will have access to Childnet’s online platform to help train and inspire them to run innovative and creative activities in their school community to keep internet safety at the top of your school’s agenda! You can find out how to sign up and more here.
We’d love to hear about what your school is doing to keep internet safety education innovative!
