Netintelligence was delighted to be a guest at E-Safety Live 2012, a day of seminars aimed at showing the education sector best practice for keeping children safe online. Two events took place in London and Edinburgh and were attended by hundreds of teachers from schools, colleges, universities as well as care organisations and the police.
We went to the Edinburgh event, held at Heriot Watt University. There were seminars right through the day but the call to action was the same throughout –parents are the key to keeping children safe online so we need to make a huge effort to engage with them so they can then engage with their children on the issue.
In our first seminar, Catriona Laing from Perth & Kinross Council gave us some startling facts and figures. For instance, did you know that more than 30 million people in the UK alone access Facebook every day, more than the number of people who voted in the last UK elections.
Catriona works with schools and care organisations in central Scotland and what she emphasised was the need to give children the skills to be safe online by working with them and their parents, and not treating either in isolation. Whilst it is accepted that middle class parents are likely to be engaged in their children’s learning, it’s the other parents who aren’t that are the hardest to reach. So, Catriona urged schools to ditch the formal presentations on e-safety if they’re not engaging this target audience and instead speak to these parents one-on-one or have information and videos available at parents’ evenings. If parents don’t come along to presentations on safety then get the parents who do to pass the messages on.
Catriona explained that a large proportion of parents still believe that content on the internet is regulated. She encouraged us to share the content of one particular video for positive reasons – it’s the video that CEOP (The Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre) has produced which takes a light hearted and realistic look at what it takes to be a better online parent. Take time to watch it if you can
Ollie Bray is a National Adviser for Emerging Technologies in Learning for Education Scotland and he used his own experiences as a teacher to make some particularly good points about the need for ‘older’ parents to embrace what their children do on the internet rather than dismissing it. He advocates opening up conversations with children about what they do online, with this being particularly important if a parent doesn’t like what their child is doing online. He says only by asking children which social networks they use, what games they play, what friends they talk to online and how they feel about what happens to them online, can we hope to earn their trust so that they will listen to parental advice on responsible use of the internet.
Ollie firmly believes that schools should learn from businesses – he urges schools to communicate with pupils and their parents like they would do if they were customers of their business. “Stop teaching children how to write a cheque,” he urged, “and teach them instead how to make their password secure.”
He says password security is really important for young gamers. He pointed to evidence that shows that hackers who get into children’s gaming accounts are not necessarily doing it to groom them, they’re doing it because they want to collect their credits and use them. It is essential he says that children and young people understand how to protect their identity online.
Ollie, who’s also a deputy head teacher, pointed out the dilemma of the often conflicting messaging given to children in secondary schools. He says teachers will often warn their first year pupils that the people they meet on Facebook are not who they say they are and yet those same children are probably already using Facebook before the accepted use age of 13 and are therefore also not the people they say they are. As a result Ollie says we need to rethink some of these core messages.
We learn through play, said Ollie, but play is changing – digital games are just another shift in playful learning. If you want challenging classrooms that offer progression and reward then, he says, you need to incorporate commercial games into the classroom rather than using out-of-date games that children don’t have any emotional connection to because they don’t play them at home.
Vicki Shotbolt who runs the ParentZone addressed what she described as the myth that today’s parents are not internet savvy. Vicki, who’s been developing parenting information since 1999, says the parents whose children are entering primary school now are the ones who were there at the blossoming of the internet. They do understand what an App is, they are on Facebook, they do have an Xbox and they play it. No longer are we talking to a generation of parents who have had to learn all of this at the same time as their children. The challenge with these parents is to make sure they have access to information about the new developments in the technology they and their children use as soon as it becomes available.
Vicki told her E-Safety Live 2012 audience that, “the single most powerful tool we have for keeping children safe online is their parents and our challenge is empowering parents.” Parents, she said, spend much of their time in a state of anxiety. They worry about everything, from which car seat to buy for their newborn, to whether their teenager will be safe on the bus into town. They have a long list of issues to talk to their children about – drugs, alcohol, safe sex… – so internet safety isn’t seen as a necessarily high priority. So how do we involve parents in their children’s digital lives? She says delivering credible, reliable and interesting information is what works. Vicki has produced a glossy magazine called Digital Parenting which she says has led to 60% of parents taking some form of action on e-safety after reading it.
She says theparentzone is currently working on ensuring that retailers become better at giving information about on the use of parental controls out when parents are buying laptops and phones for their children.
Patricia Cartes, of Facebook, presented one of the most popular seminars of the day. She spoke about how Facebook works with its users to build trust and engagement on its safe usage policies. She highlighted the new Social Reporting functionality that was introduced in 2011 which, she said, had led to a big decrease in the number of official reports of abuse to Facebook because users were now able to sort out a lot of the issues between themselves. She pointed out that sensitive issues were however still highly prioritised by their Help Centre.
She explained that privacy was the most important issue for children using Facebook because the network was essentially built on a ‘real name’ culture so you are supposed to be you and not pretending to be someone else.
While there is still a debate around the use of Facebook by under 13s, Patricia explained that Facebook was very conscious of the need for children to protect their privacy. She encouraged everyone to use the custom settings that are available – allowing you to choose the audience you want to you share your information with, which might not include everyone in your network all the time.
She highlighted the special privacy protections for people under age of 18 which prevented any public sharing of their information and discovery through search engines.
There is always an argument between ‘Freedom v Censorship’ she said but insisted that privacy was a very important issue to discuss with children.
All in all E-Safety Live 2012 gave its audience plenty to think about.
The challenge for us all is to put it into practice.
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