At the start of the academic year I make sure to plan several e-safety lessons for students from 7 years and up. This is a logical topic to start with because it outlines the behaviours that students should follow online. This year I also delivered an e-safety assembly, which, in keeping with the themes for Safer Internet Day, provided an overview of:
– Online Safety
– Digital Responsibility
– Positive Uses of Technology
As each of these themes cover very different aspects of e-safety, I put together this short video animation using Video Scribe to consolidate and reinforce students’ learning:
After watching this video, we played “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” Safer Internet Edition using this PowerPoint:
[embeddoc url=”https://technologyforlearners.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/millionaire_template.ppt”]
In addition, we looked at key statistics based on responses from a Safer Internet Google Form that I had sent out to all students just weeks prior to the assembly. This made for interesting commentary during the assembly about students’ opinions, attitudes and behaviours with respect to e-safety. Here are some of the results that we gleaned from the survey, which I included in the presentation for students:
About 1 in 5 of you think that all the information on the Internet is TRUE!
More than half of you spend 3 hours or more on the Internet everyday – and at weekends, most of you spend 5 hours or more online!
The most popular social networks are:
- YouTube
- Snapchat
About 1 in 10 of you claim to have been cyber bullied at some point.
About half of you say that you know someone who has been cyber bullied.
Exactly 1 in 10 of you say that you have been asked to send inappropriate pictures of yourself to someone else.
We also used the assembly to focus on the topic of cyberbullying, raising awareness of the problem and providing guidance on how to tackle it. Our school’s psychologist used the opportunity to discuss with the students the topic of empathy, emphasising the importance of respecting differences between individuals.
This assembly was concluded by reminding students of the SMART rules for Internet Safety:
Safe – be careful not to give out personal information online.
Meeting – remember, online friends are still strangers.
Acceptable – accepting unknown emails can cause problems.
Reliable – always check information with other websites.
Tell – report problems to a trust adult.
Concluding thoughts…
We all have a role to play to make the Internet a better place. This means demonstrating good netiquette, keeping ourselves and other people safe, as well as creating positive content. For more information, it is worth taking a look at The Ultimate Parent Guide for Protecting Your on the Internet.
