This text links
to my previous text on sexuality in blog 6.
I have tried to make this text more reader friendly,
as it is intended that you save some of the links for your future practice.
On SE, when I am
in the classroom in ICT, my first brief to the class, is about the e-safety
rules. This action reflects Lord Byron’s report (BECTA, 2005) in the National
guidelines for e-safety advice for children. The advice focuses on three main areas referred
to as 3 C’s:
Content:
Contact:
Conduct:
The two main big
issues of e-safety are grooming and bullying (BECTA, 2005). The dangers are so
obvious but the attitude of, ‘it won’t happen to me’ are so often too cavalier! There
exists some excellent sites for information on E-safety, ‘Kids smart’; ‘Think
you know’ and ‘Know it all’ etc. They are really good and the Byron report (BECTA, 2005) recommends these sites for more information.
Posing questions:
what can we do? How can we make the internet safer and protect them (children)?
These are questions we must ask every day, and every time we use ICT in the
classroom. We must be vigilant and report any suspicious activity.
All schools are
committed to a safe learning environment; an infrastructure of whole-school
awareness, designed responsibilities, policies and procedures. Making sure
everyone is aware of the issues and how they impact on the school. E-safety was
specially addressed at Government level in the Byron Review… Resilience
building to educate children to be more savvy on the web.
'ICT support for cyber
safety' I found to be a really good site- it included e-safety: developing whole
school policies to support effective practice. I recommend this site is saved
for your future reference.
Teachers should
know already that e-safety is embedded in meeting part of the professional
standards: Q21, Q8, Q1, Q4, Q7, Q17 and Q23 (Maunders, 2005).
The final word is
one of positivity! ICT is for the most part fun, educational, exciting
(Maunders, 2013). It is creative, social, and interactive such as Web 2.0,
multimodal, novel and it crosses every subject in the curriculum as we have seen during our seminars. The
pedagogical potential is still in its infancy. For this reason, as it grows,
the security and safety must grow with it, in tandem.
Remember, children
being so vulnerable, they may not realise the dangers ICT can bring through
engagement and these issues can happen in or out of school. Let us all enjoy the internet safely.
Bibliography
Maunders, P. (2013) ICT Support Cyber safety http://ictsupport.weebly.com/safety-on-the-internet.html (Accessed on 05/03/2014)
Becta (2005)‘E-Safety –
guide to whole school responsibilities. http://www.wisekids.org.uk/BECTA%20Publications/esafety.pdf
(Accessed on: 09/03/2014)
It is interesting to see your take on internet safety as I also wrote a blog post on this! I have never thought about e-safety being part of teachers professional standards so thank you for sharing that. Something I noticed whilst in school for ICT today was the mouse mats that the children have in the ICT suite. They were about e-safety and I thought they were tremendous as children are reminded of being safe on the internet!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Nicola, I had not thought about e-safety as part of the standards, but see now how well it fits in to them. I agree that using ICT and the internet should be seen as fun and educational to engage children with their learning, however you make some good points about e-safety and how important it is.
ReplyDeleteWith regards to the two comments above, I appreciate the reference to the teaching standards and the notable e-safety points. This area of development in the seminars has moved my understanding and awareness forwards tremendously. I never noticed the mouse mats and the e-safety guide, its the little things that make big differences.
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