Social Network for Primary school children

[GlorifiedBabysitter]

My son has recently returned home from school and told me about a new social networking site that has been set up by the school.

He has recently signed up and can't stop raving about it. Apparently, he posts comments to his friends, can upload pictures, and share games that are popular in his year group.

Obviously, I was not entirely happy with the idea at first. It occurs to me that cyber-bullying and inappropriate content could be put up by other children at his school.

On the other hand, I have been assured that the school monitors the content, children can report inappropriate content to the school by clicking a button, and only the children at that school can have access to the site. Apparently, the school is very much involved.

With the inevitable use of facebook in the future it is possibly not such a bad first port of call as an introduction to social networking for him and his friends. An article by the BBC stated that "Almost half of British children aged 9 to 12 are using social networking sites, despite minimum age limits"

Please let me know what you think!

We have a similar "social network" for our children. The difference between this and sites like facebook are all comments are monitored to prevent the concerns you have. It can't be viewed by the general public to protect the children and one of it's main purposes is to equip children with the skills and knowledge to keep them safe on the internet.
The ultimate aim is to use it as a showcase for children's work in school available to parents. www.radiowaves.co.uk/about#

Before we began using the site we invited parents in to discuss concerns and to talk to the experts. We also gave them the right to veto their child's work being put on the site.

Sounds like a great idea to me.

We have our 'virtual learning environment', on which children can message each other, download homework, do questionnaires, read school info, and parents can view policies, curriculum info, etc. It is completely safe, as I (as administrator) control who can view each page.
I can also control who can contribute to each 'course', and have special sections that the school council and head boys and girls run by themselves.
It is also a good safe place to post pics of trips and residentials (residentials can be done in real time with children posting from the trip location).
I can also view conversations between the children, and have regular checks to make sure that there is no nasty business going on (and to have a little giggle at their fledging-facebook trivia!) On one occasion, I had to have a quiet word with the Y6 teachers about a bit of riske language, but nothing else!
It was the previous government's target that all schools should have their VLEs up and running by 2011, but I think that's something that's been ditched by this government.

We ditched our VLE to be honest

It is a pain to monitor though.

It depends how much use there is basically all messages are saved for the teacher to authorise which means reading through and allowing. We found with the VLE provided by the LEA we got a lot of "facebook" type messages ... I'm watching Eastenders ...What do you think about xxxx? ...I've had chips for tea ... I'm going out on my bike to the park... whereas the comments with Raidiowaves tend to be more constructive ... I really like your story ... Could you include xxxx in your video I think it would make it better ...

I agree that our VLE (likewise LEA provided) is really clunky and not exactly at the technological helm. But it is a really useful place to put all the policies and all the signposting for parents.
It was REALLY useful recently when we did a pupil questionnaire. All I had to do was transfer all the 350 x15 answers to a spreadsheet.
(I'm not a total fan, but I'm not as sceptical as I was when we initially did the training.)
And radiowaves does look good for the children!

Can parents get access to it - ie see what their kids see? If not, then I'd be a bit cautious. Of course some people would say having that means their kids wouldn't be tempted to use the "big, bad world" of Facebook, but the two arguments against that are that some kids might also get onto FB anyway (perhaps having been "exposed" with this school site), and others would say, I didn't have FB in my day, not even in uni, they can jolly well do without any sort of social networking site and meet their friends in person or write snail mail.

I would not really be comfortable with a site that only the teachers or headteacher or school IT perrson can see but parents can't. But that's just my own preference. If parents can, then I don't see why not, if the child wants.

Yes our parents will have a password to access the site. We were shocked by how many of our very young pupils had facebook accounts and wanted a "safe" alternative where they can be taught how to keep safe of course we have no control over parents who are happy to create facebook accounts for children this age.

I would really hate this, I'm sure I'm in the minority however.

DS's school is just introducing such a thing. I can see the benefit for school projects but not the need for social networking. The school has decided parents can see parents' pages but not those of the children. I am not keen on the message that their online activity is something to be kept secret from parents. Other primary schools in the LEA let parents see the class pages of their child.

I'd say it depends on the "social network" in question.

DD1 has this at her school, the site is called SuperClubsPlus. You cannot post any photographs, just jpegs that you've created in Paint etc. There are also forums where you can chat but it is heavily moderated and children have to learn the rules like only first names allowed, no exchanging of any other personal info like address, phone numbers etc. The children earn stars and badges that they can display on their profiles, and they learn a lot in the process of earning them. How to build simple web pages, embedding stuff in the pages, using scrips etc.

There can also be no mention of girlfriend/boyfriend stuff, being in love etc. so those references are deleted.

There is a messaging system and that is moderated too. Only school children are on it as the children are signed up by the school. If you want to apply privately they will first contact the school to check that said child goes there.

Oh and the child can log in from home so you can see their pages and their friends' too.

you can see their pages, you just have to look over their shoulder when they're using them. After all, you DO have the computer in a shared area of the house, don't you??

megapixels, you know most digital photographs ARE JPEGs, right? If they are prevented from posting photos, you can bet that's done thru active moderation.

I'm sure there was an item on the BBC recently about a school which had introduced blogging and found that the literacy rates (especially among boys) has zoomed as they were so inspired to write their blogs.

I'll see if I can find a link.

Can't find the BBC item - but here's an article from the Independent about the school and it's improvements.

www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/blog-early-blog-often-the-secret-to-making-boys-write-properly-2211232.html

Sorry, I mean they are NOT jpegs, they are only bmps.