E-Safety

The Anti-Bullying Alliance and the Sex Education Forum have released advice on keeping an open door to teens to talk about online friendship, love and relationships

A new document from the Kent e-Safety Strategy Group: “Using Social Media and Technology in Education Settings” is available with the following introduction:

“Online social media tools such as blogs, Wikis, social networking and video sharing sites can be excellent tools for teaching and learning and can provide exciting and new opportunities for schools to engage, communicate and collaborate with pupils and the wider community.

The positive use of social media and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) within schools and settings for curriculum and learning should be encouraged.

However it is essential that their use is carefully considered in advance by the school Senior Leadership Team in order to ensure all members of the school community are kept safe and to reduce the likelihood of any risks or dangers being encountered.

This new document aims to help senior leadership team members within schools and other educational settings, consider safe practice when using social media tools and technology in order to protect staff, pupils and the wider community.

The document provides schools with considerations to make regarding safe practice as well as information and guidance about best practise and risk assessment templates to use to assess sites and technologies for risks. ”

The document and other related resources are available here.

The seminal work called simply “Cyberbullying” on this area was published by the DCSF in 2007  and could be found on Techernet, whilst Childnet Digizen Cyberbullying site has  resources covering cyberbullying which was the focus of AntiBullying Week in November 2009

Digizen Cyberbullying              Overview leaflet              DCSF Cyberbullying

The Anti Bullying Alliance has produced a guide to tackling bullying in January 2011

AntiBullying Alliance                                                 Guide to tackling bullying

and Cybermentors has a number  of resourcees here

Kirklees Council Schools ICT support services (ITCAS)  also has a link page on this topic, and YHGFL has links to other Regional and National resources, but these may need adapting for non school use

ITCAS Cyberbullying page                                   YHGFL Cyberbullying pages

The BBC Tracey Beaker site has a “you choose” story line and a Newsround story on the subject.

DCSF has published updated guidance on tackling bullying in general which may also be a useful reference when tackling cyberbullying

The KSCB working party are writing a guide for adults in Kirklees about being a “First responder” to an e-safety incident:

First-Response-to-eSafety-incidents-guidance-Vs5r41

which complements KSCB Safeguarding General Procedure and KSCB LADO Flowchart and the UK National helpline for professionals

You can email kscb.admin at kirklees.gov.uk if you have a particular e-safety concern you think others should be aware of or use the “contact us” form above.

In encouraging children to report e-safety incidents it is usual to promote the idea of telling a trusted adult, or alternatively a service run by trustworhty organisations such as

Cybermentors                                      Childline                                                Thinkyouknow

If you are responding to an incident involving data loss you may also want to refer to the ICOs guidance on whether formal notifcation is needed ICO guidance on data security breach management

Teachtoday gives some other useful contacts to help to report an incident to content providers and there is reference to Facebook on a separate page

Teachtoday useful contacts                                            Facebook troubles

OfCom give a link to a site where you can report fraud here

“In June 2011, the European Commission published the first batch of findings of a second independent assessment of the implementation of the Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU.”

See here to read the assement for the site you use!

YHGFL have produced some advice to protect users and assist in responding to incidents involving the Formspring social networking site and is available here

Following the advice given below the Facebook  help pages  have now been remodelled as a “Family safety centre” with additional links and information

“Richard Allen, European Director for Facebook advises…..

……. Facebook has been phasing out open mailers like abuse@ because they have became devalued for serious reports as people have increasingly used them for a lot of non-abuse related queries as the address became known over time. 

Anyone emailing this address should be getting a clear set of instructions on the proper ways to report things which generally involve making a report using a link on the relevant profile or item of content.

The relevant information is also available in the help centre.  The best place to start off for particular issues is generally http://www.facebook.com/safety

…..there is a description of how to deal with hacked accounts at http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1011 and the easiest thing in most cases is for the student to recover their account by simple tool at http://www.facebook.com/reset.php

If they are no longer able to access the original email account for the account or it has been changed there is a different process at http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1025‘

Facebook will be revising the links on Teachtoday to ensure that there are appropriate references to the help centre advice.

(Taken from safetynet advisory email)

Further advice and support to teachers can also be gained from most teaching unions.

If you are a Facebook user you may also be interested to read about recent changes to the privacy of the service that have been in May and in August  2010 or about the CEOP “bouncer” application for Facebook  you can download from here or an article about things you can do as a parent  “

The Kirklees primary school blog has a  post about a novel intervention used in this primary class

There is lots of advice on the internet about the technical controls you should have in place to protect children and those that work with them on personal computers, but here are a few sites we would recommend

MS home security site                                        Childnets Sorted Site

Get safe online campaign site                           Bectas information security guidance

For information about technical controls on mobile devices and games consoles see here. For information on larger scale content filtering systems see here.

There are some introductary videos to the subject and information about Safe Searching from Google here

YHGFL have a section on their site about technical controls  here

OfCom have a guide to parents on protecting children in a digital world here

If you have a smartphone or digital camera that has GPS, by default, you could be giving away your location to anyone who can see the photo or read your post by including GPS coordinates (a Geotag) property.

Learn more about Geotagging, related risks and how to control location related features here

You may also be interested to reread concerns about the Facebook “Places” service (see here) or its photo recognisition service (see here)