Safe internet Use at school

[jackierussell]

I would be grateful for advice / experience re Internet use at school. Our dc is starting in September and the welcome pack includes a sheet to agree to Internet access but that we won't hold the school resposible for any inappropriate material accessed and that we accept responsibility for setting standards re selecting, sharing and exploring info and media. Is this standard?

[Wellthen]

Yep sounds pretty standard. You can trust the school to:
Guide children's use - there should be learning objectives and aims when using the internet
Supervise - most of the time you can see all their screens dos there's no opportunity for random surfing.
Teach them internet safety.

They are relying on you to: understand that the internet can be unpredictable and it only takes a second for a child to search something dodgy.
Understand that another child saying 'hey little Johnny, search vagina images, its really cool!' - leading to little Johnny being traumatised when searching at home - is not actually the schools fault.Supervise your kids internet use and support what the school is saying such s 'always ask a grown up, don't be 'friends' with people you don't know, dont send nasty messages' etc

[AsBrightAsAJewel]

Childnet website
Digiduck's Big Decision

[AsBrightAsAJewel]

And Thinkuknow

[bloodyteenagers]

Yup.
It's not the fault of the school that some parents do not put any
Blocks on their wifi. That they use no filters. That they don't supervise their children. That they allow their young children Facebook accounts. That they let their child have YouTube accounts and upload. Nor is it the school fault that some parents allow online play with anyone in the world.

They will try and educate parents by holding workshops, but the ones these are aimed at don't bother. They will educate children on safe use etc. they will be filters in school that blocks stuff

[Lara2]

Blimey, my school has filters from the county. We certainly don't ask parents not to hold us responsible for sites/material accessed. We also have a program (can't remember the name) that searches for inappropriate language, content etc on the internet and in any program on our server that anyone is using - adults and children.

[clam]

Filters don't get rid of everything. My class were writing newspaper reports on Little Red Riding Hood last year, and wanted to include pictures to invent captions for. They put in "Little Red Riding Hood" to google images and hey presto! Lots of pictures of scantily-clad women in red basques with capes.

[formidable]

Same here clam.

Class project on foxes requiring a google image search = oh dear god

Boy's Star Wars project - try typing Princess Leia into google image search.

YouTube is a goddamn minefield. All those recommended videos down the sidebar... Well is there any rap or hip hop video these days which doesn't have almost naked women?

[spanieleyes]

And yet some parents come in all guns blazing when something similar slips through the filters ( and something always does as it's a constant battle to keep on top of new sites) yet can't understand why concern is expressed about 8 year olds having facebook accounts!

Our county filters are so strict that CBBC was a banned site for quite a while!!

[AsBrightAsAJewel]

Research shows that the children that are safest are not those totally protected from it all, but are those who are trained to know how to recognise and respond to the risks online. Schools must have good filters, but stuff gets through, however as educators are role is to teach children how to navigate the digital world and keep themselves as safe as possible. It is part of the primary curriculum (e.g. this)

[Hulababy]

Standard form ime.

We have LEA wide filtering for all out Internet. However, nothing can ever b completely risk free as new webpages appear daily and people use different spellings of words all the time on their own pages, which can get through filters.

However, the school should do plenty of e-safety info with the children whenever they use the computers/tablets, and what to do if they ever see anything vaguely worrying.

Children won't use them on their own entirely. There will be teacher supervision - but obviously 1 teacher and 30 children can never stop everything, though in EYFS it is often smaller groups and more than one adult.

FWIW I teach computing to this age group and have never had an issue. We monitor regularly.

[Hulababy]

Our children cannot access You Tube at all - social media is blocked by the county.

Google images can be a minefield - we wouldn't let EYFS to use Google images generally. From Y1 up we are very careful and give children keywords spelled correctly, and pre search beforehand. But it is really tricky - sometimes adding the word clipart to the search helps.

[Feenie]

Have had similar results when a child googled 'nice biscuits' which revealed some ladies showing their...erm...nice biscuits.

(Hey Clam, how are the reports going this year? Mine aren't atm, keep getting given a million and one other things to do )

[clam]

@ feenie Pfft. Hard-going. Have so much else going on at the moment, it's been too easy to find excuses to ignore them. Got maths, English and general comments left to do for about half the class. How about you?

Sorry for side-tracking. (Story of my life)

[AsBrightAsAJewel]

"My Little Pony" search can lead to some awful stuff!

[soapboxqueen]

Yy to my little pony. We have a lot of safety features for ds but still managed to get through some rather distasteful my little pony cartoons which I think are deliberately labeled to sneak past filters.

No filter or safeguard is 100%. When I trained to be a teacher, a few kids realised they could get passed the filter by typing in rude words in another language. Oooh there were some naked women and a few other things going on. Cue the entire language department being hauled in to type in as many rude words and body parts as they could into the filter programme. Lawks!

[Feenie]

All my writing comments and 26 general comments to go! So not much then

[WhoKnowsWhereTheTimeGoes]

We've got google safe search locked on at home and never found anything inappropriate when searching images, but I got a shock when looking for "fox dressing up" on Ebay in relation to World Book Day.

[WhoKnowsWhereTheTimeGoes]

But using safe search at home leads to another problem - my DCs think searching Google images is fine, they do it all the time. So they may well go and do it on computers at friends or grandparents houses, which don't have safe search on. It's hard trying to remember all the things you need to warn them about.

[jackierussell]

Thanks for all the advice and links, i guess we have another area to start working on!