Switched On - 6 Areas Your School’s Internet Safety Policy Should Be Addressing
We can’t protect children from all the dangers of the internet, but we can teach them to protect themselves, says Ollie Bray There is a lot of talk about protecting children online, but the advice we give is often simply, ‘Don’t speak to anyone you haven’t met before’. It’s hard to argue with the intent, […]
- by Ollie Bray
We can’t protect children from all the dangers of the internet, but we can teach them to protect themselves, says Ollie Bray
There is a lot of talk about protecting children online, but the advice we give is often simply, ‘Don’t speak to anyone you haven’t met before’. It’s hard to argue with the intent, but it’s worth thinking about the last time you were at a conference, or just needed change from someone in a car park. Did you speak to anyone you didn’t know?
The truth is that many school internet safety programmes need to be updated. Rather than taking an approach that most adults feel comfortable with – which often start with words like ‘do not’, ‘should not’ and ‘never’ – it is time we committed to some serious professional development in this area.
In this article, I want to cover a number of key points and associated messages that should be considered essential knowledge for all those working with children and young people.
1 Speaking the same language
Channel 4 recently commissioned research from OTX into the relationships young people (aged 12-24) have with technology. Its findings included the following:
• They frequently conduct over five activities whilst watching TV • 25% of them agree that “I’d rather stay at home than go on a holiday with no internet or phone access” • A quarter of the young people interviewed text or IM (instant message) friends they are a physically with at the time • They have, on average, 123 friends on their social network spaces
While all of these statistics are interesting, the figure concerning mobile phones and holidays is perhaps the most important, because it demonstrates how technology has had an impact on youth culture. Imagine asking the same question 10 years ago before mobile phones were ubiquitous – the result would be completely different. Similarly, if you show the latest ‘digital camera’ to an eight-year-old child and ask him what it is, he will simply call it a ‘camera’.
According to the data, the average number of friends for young people on a social networking space is 123. In reality, it’s 24-year-olds who have closer to 123 friends; 12-year-olds often have many, sometimes hundreds more. One of the reasons for this is that our definition of what a ‘friend’ is has changed. To an adult, a friend is probably someone that you trust – someone with whom you would share your deepest secrets. To a young person, a ‘friend’ is an associate, which might include someone on a social networking space they have never met .
Practitioners wishing to keep young people safe online must understand the modern-day definition of a friend. We need to speak a common language with young people – even if we don’t agree with it. In short, technology is changing youth culture, but it is also changing language.
KEY MESSAGE It is really important that we talk to children about their online experiences and ask them questions about what they do online. Asking a child about his favourite website is one thing, but asking what it does is even more important. Unless you know what young people are doing online, it will be very difficult to offer safety advice.
2 Knowledge vs. wisdom
One of the challenges we face when teaching internet safety and responsible use is that adults sometimes don’t believe they have the skills and knowledge required to teach young people how to stay safe online. But teachers and parents need to understand that even though they may not be competent in the latest technology, they still have the wisdom to protect children.
The ‘Tesco’ scenario provides a useful illustration. Try asking a group of young people if they would write their name, address and phone number on a photograph of themselves, photocopy it 100 times and then give it to the first 100 people they see walking out of their local Tesco store. The answer is obviously ‘no’ – wisdom tells us this is not a sensible thing to do.
It is the job of the responsible adult to link the wisdom learned in the physical world to the wisdom that is required to stay safe in the virtual world.
KEY MESSAGE The basic concept of ‘stranger danger’ is the same in the digital and the physical world, and it is the job of the responsible adult to link the two. Try using the above Tesco’s example with your class.
3 Digital footprints
One of the most difficult concepts to try and get across to young people is that of the ‘digital footprint’. A digital footprint is basically the trail of online information that you leave behind as you upload information to the internet. It includes information that other people write about you on their social networking spaces, or when your name is mentioned – say in a digitised newspaper article. Research from AVG suggests the average age at which a child acquires an online presence courtesy of his parents is six months. By the time they are two, 81% of children have some kind of digital footprint.
Digital footprints present a number of problems for educators. The first is that practically everybody has a digital footprint, and the second is that in order to get a job in the future, it is very likely that employers will ‘Google’ you to find out if you’re a suitable candidate. The key safety message here is that we should all endeavour to create a good and responsible digital footprint that reflects who we are and our personal values.
It is also important to remember that it is almost impossible to delete anything from the internet. Anything that you upload to a website or social networking space is likely to be there forever. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a good example of how unpublished websites can still be viewed online.
KEY MESSAGE Adults, including parents, need to understand that it is incredibly difficult to delete anything from the internet. They also need to understand that most young people will have a digital footprint. Try ‘Googling’ yourself to get an idea of your own digital footprint.
4 Privacy
Over 50% of the UK population have a Facebook profile. When we sign up to Facebook we normally agree to share our data, even if we then go on to delete our account. People who don’t have a Facebook account are equally at risk, because many of their online ‘friends’ have already given Facebook lots of data about them. This includes tagging them in photographs and handing over their email address lists.
Facebook’s privacy controls are actually not that bad – the problem is understanding how to set your privacy settings. This is particularly the case when we consider that the language Facebook uses is aimed at people over the age of 13 (you have to be 13 to have a Facebook account). Of course, many young people under the age of 13 have their own profile – but this isn’t Facebook’s fault.
KEY MESSAGE In the UK, privacy is a right – but understanding what privacy actually means is far more complicated. When parents sign up to websites on behalf of their children, it is important for them to understand what information they have just agreed to give away. In short, you need to read the terms and conditions.
5 Emotional intelligence
We all know there is some very inappropriate content on the internet. Some of this is universally inappropriate, such as child abuse images, extreme pornography and racist material. Other content is inappropriate for certain age groups or levels of maturity. It is the latter that is likely to have the greatest impact on young people, as they come into contact with online material for which they are not emotionally ready.
Television shows that are streamed and then available to watch online are a good example of this. In the past, young people coming into contact with age-sensitive television material were protected by two things. The first was that households often only had one television, typically in the living room. The second was the watershed – television aimed at an adult audience was broadcast after 9pm.
The ubiquitous nature of computers, laptops, games consoles and mobile devices has changed this. Many young people now have access to their own devices, which can be used to watch traditionally post-watershed television at any time. Often this is achieved just by simply ticking an on-screen box to say they are over 16.
Children often want and need to talk about what they have seen online, and it is important that as education professionals we facilitate this. This is vital if we want to help young people understand the difference between fantasy and reality.
KEY MESSAGE It is really important that we talk to children about what they have seen. It is also important that children feel comfortable talking with adults about their digital experiences. This includes showing an interest in their digital world.
6 Verifying information
Digital literacy is at the heart of internet safety and responsible use. Today’s young people will increasingly consume more and more content digitally. In the past, we taught young people how to assess the reliability of traditional sources, such as books, maps and newspapers. In the modern age we must extend this verification to digital sources. Just because something has been published online, that doesn’t mean that it is true, or in any way based on evidence.
Young people need to be able to view a webpage and look for evidence of who wrote the text, when it was published and where it is hosted. In short, they need to be able to ask critical questions about the content and then develop their own informed opinions as to how reliable it is. Increasingly, this will involve verifying information through the use of search engines and recommendations from others. It will also involve being able to do this not just for text, but also for digital and moving images.
The critical questions required to assess the validity of written digital source are exactly the same set of questions a child should ask each time he encounters another person in the digital world. These skills need to be developed and nurtured from a very early age.
KEY MESSAGE For all types of information (most importantly, digital information) children need to be able to critically question both sources and reliability so they can start to form their own opinion regarding its accuracy.
Teachers can help by asking leading questions such as ‘Do you know who wrote that?’, ‘Can you tell me when the web page was written?’, ‘Can you find out when the web page was last updated?’ and ‘How do you know that picture is real?’
Ollie Bray is headteacher of Kingussie High School in the Cairngorms National Park, Scottish Highlands; for more information, visit olliebray.typepad.com or follow @olliebray
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