It's an essay I'm afraid....
Parents need to be allowed to parent. There are going to be many variables in the way households manage children’s access to the internet and also some barriers. I believe fear, lack of understanding and finance are the biggest barriers.
Fear is something that I see amongst the parents of my primary age children. Some parents go with the blanket you’re too young ban, others are very controlling and stand over their children when online – or online time is ten minutes under supervision to do specific homework tasks. Some give complete free access not understanding any element of parent controls, checking history or talking to the child about ‘the internet’. In the area we live a lot of families move regularly – high rental area. Due to this they don’t necessarily have home phone and broadband packages and tend to surf online via mobiles. Children in these families tend to then not have access, unless a parent shows them a youtube clip on a phone.
There is always going to be a generation gap with technology developing at a rate faster than the older generation are naturally in tune with. Parents don’t need to be fully abreast of all the changes but do need to have a basic understanding of what the internet is. How to nurture their childs use of it as an amazing social, educational learning and entertainment tool and how to manage the situation when things go wrong – from cyber bullying, trolling, data protection to online grooming. There are already some fantastic resources available online to self-educate about these areas. Parents need to periodically make use of these and stay vaguely aware of what the latest risks are. Schools could act as a natural information point to direct parents towards these sites as part of standard school newsletters and information packs.
Life is full of dangers. In any domestic set up there are drawers of sharp knifes, bottles of poison (bleach etc) yet we live in our homes and for the majority our children remain unharmed – because we educate them. We don’t give a toddler a sharp knife to play with. They generally learn a knife is for cutting with a table knife and we go over and over again that you don’t hold the blade end, you don’t put the knife in your mouth, you don’t run carrying a knife. Yet many just hand over an unrestricted tablet and release their child onto the internet. Learning safe online play is just like any other learning activity. It takes time, repetition and possibly the odd mistake for the lesson to be learnt.
I live in an area many may class as deprived. Significantly above average FSM in my younger twos school. My daughters class has eight children, in Yr1, who can barely speak or don’t speak any English - so practically 1/3 of the class. All children would benefit enormously from access to learn on line, from differentiated learning to allow language skills to develop, from free learning in some (sadly many) instances because parents aren’t engaged with nurturing learning. To have the internet as a tool in class I’m sure would help teach the diverse range of pupils.
My own children are 5, 10 and 13. They have tablets and the older two also smart phones and PC’s. I love that they can investigate and pursue their personal interests. My eldest is Autistic and has obsessional tendencies. The internet has been a saviour that he can investigate things to the nth degree. He likes information and we need to keep him involved in plans for all family activities. With the internet we can go on google earth and show him where we’re travelling too. We can watch YouTube clips that others have uploaded, we can go to virtual airport and trainstation sites to understand what travel will be like.
My middle son at 10, is just starting to really grasp how wonderful it is to be able to google ANYTHING. The positives have been when he’s asked questions like how much higher is Everest than Mont Blanc we can say ‘google it’, the negatives he can look up the latest ‘naughty’ word he’s heard at school – but even that is positive because we can see what he’s being exposed to and deal with it. As we can see what he’s been up to, monitor his history and talk to him about the things he’s been interested in. We have had a few internet use issues such as him watching adult video game footage when a gamer he liked moved from minecraft onto GrandTheftAuto and various other violent games. This led to nightmares and discussion about clicking through from one subject to another, as I see it part of the learning process that will make him a more rounded character ready for the adult world.
My youngest at five is also under investigation for ASD and has a very enquiring (endlessly questioning) mind. She has up until now, been restricted to sites (by our instruction) that we put shortcuts to on her home screen. Her spelling and typing have developed to the level that she can now explore. As technology progresses she’s also discovered speech recognition functionality and so can put in quite complex search strings – something we’re monitoring, but probably means her searches are more closely directed to those things she wants to find rather than a broader and sometimes quite random selection of sites. She is generally in our presence online as the family PC is in the lounge. She has a tablet but we have agreed methods of use like she is only allowed on the shortcuts from the homepage that we set up together. If we find other sites she wants to access when playing on the family PC these get added as a shortcut. We monitor her history just to keep an eye that she’s not straying.
All the children use the PC’s for homework and for learning aps. My younger two have access to a spelling ap that their teacher enters their spellings into and then they practice the list, the words are sounded out (great for non English speakers) and they can play various games like word searches and hangman based around the words. This is far easier as a parent and a child. It’s a faster method of learning than the endless daily write, nag and rewrite that I did with my eldest for his spellings.
I think the internet is amazing. I would like to see us embrace it and widely encourage its supervised use from nursery age onwards. One of the wonderful things about British culture is that we question, we learn and we are informed. I love that we have historically had such a cross section of printed media, that we have the wonderful unbiased BBC news, we empower each other to have great freedom of speech. We are a true democracy. Globally, I think this is really rare and we should celebrate this culture and as part of it celebrate the wondrous thing the internet can be whilst gently educating about the risks via our fantastic education system.
The government has an interesting role to play. I would hate to see significant controls put in on internet useage but also feel that some reporting systems and guidelines to online companies need to be in place – particularly the likes of twitter, facebook and mass communication sites.
I’d like to see some form of social responsibility pressure put on sites once they reach a certain level of membership. I’m out of my depth of understanding at this stage but feel there must be some options open to us along the lines that initial site signups to the site need to be from a fixed private IP address – so users are traceable and trolling by creating multiple anonymous accounts becomes more complex. Internet service providers must have lists of their private IP addresses. Rather like when you sign up for an email you need another email and a phone number to verify who you are. Any system can be worked around but each layer of complexity reduces the number of rogue users.
I would like all search engines to have a report feature that if you stumble across a completely inappropriate site you can send the link and then have their own internal flagging systems for sites that are mass reported to be passed onto appropriate bodies to be dealt with, i.e. the police.
I think the internet is completely underutilised in schools. The barriers are similar to those I see for parents. Fear, lack of understanding (in staff, governors and parents) and finance.
Fear of getting it wrong shouldn’t be the reason not to nurture learning. It appears we are reinventing the wheel in schools and LEA’s up and down the country. Why is every teacher in every school routing around and stumbling across things that could be useful, why does every LEA have its own little underfunded department cobbling together some form of schools controlled internet. This seems like a vast waste of resource when if all the LEA small pots of resource where put together we could have one decently funded department that put a decent schools net together. We could have a login ID for every school age pupil and teacher in the UK maybe based on their NHS number if their national insurance number isn’t yet generated. We could have a schoolsnet type social media forums and film uploading facilities. Yes, children would troll, bully and get it wrong. Children do these things in real life – it’s part of learning. Having an environment where we can allow them to make mistakes and teach them it’s wrong (because they’d be traceable and schools could get reports on their pupils usage) would help the next generation move into the wider world of the internet safely.
I’m in my early 40’s. We had a computer room at my school. One computer to four people and access for 1 hour a week for one term a year as I recall. I in theory have approximately 30 years left in the workplace so there will be many, many current teachers whose schooling and computer use was of a similar nature. The majority of these people are not going to fully get up to speed with the full ins and outs. It is also going to keep evolving. The best we can hope for is some decent simple exposure to an environment that’s monitored so we can start the learning ball rolling.
Financially schools don’t need to take all the burden. At secondary level, almost every child would appear to have a smart phone of some sort. These are now available for the cost of the compulsory casio calculator that was part of school kit when I was a teen. To have a wifi enabled device as part of standard secondary school kit should be a necessity.
At primary basic android tablets are available for around the £30 mark so really should be accessible to every child. Culturally they could again be seen as part of basic school kit with a standard format of tablet agreed.
My biggest worry for the internet is we try to over control and regulate it.