Internet Safety School Curriculum
Internet safety is an important topic for children and teenagers to learn. The quickly growing population of netizens, some of whom are not wholesome, creates a situation where surfing the internet, and answering emails can easily become a dangerous past time. So, if you, or your school does not have an online safety curriculum, here are some suggestions on what to cover.
Primary
- Never give out full name, address, contact information like phone numbers
- If something makes the child feel uncomfortable, to leave the computer immediately, and to tell an adult
- If the child thinks someone is trying to bully them, to not respond to the attack, and to tell an adult about it
- The basics of how viruses can steal information from their computer - only if they install the software
- Not everything on the internet is true, and people who say they're a child may not be
- Never arrange to meet someone they have only spoken to online
Secondary
Depending on the school that you teach in, the internet filter may block sites that could be very useful to secondary pupils, and useful in your teaching. By teaching responsibility when using the sites, rather than simply denying them, the pupil will probably find new respect for the sites (such as blogs, wikis etc) and use them inside and outside of school in an mature manner.
- Reiterate the dangers of communicating with people online. Create a fake profile with an image found online, add some friends, and create a fake bio. This will demonstrate that anyone can do it. Point out small details like facebook stating "you must use your real name" actually means nothing!
- The amount of information given out - along with photographs / videos of them - can actually put the person at risk from stalkers / predators. Details of their school, photos of their locality, photos of friends, school uniform etc can help a predator track them down, without them even being aware. Perhaps demonstrate with groupwork, from a typical fake Myspace / Bebo profile, what information could be gleaned from basic details, and how that could be used to put that person at risk
- Why do young people want pages such as Myspace / Facebook / Bebo? Explore what they offer in terms of advantages to communication, whilst also exploring the cons
- Look at past newspaper reports of cyber-bullying, suicides, and physical attacks originating through the use of these sites and explore how these situations originated.
- Explore how the information shown on profile pages, can be used by employers, police forces and other authorative figures to judge the person. For example, job applications being denied, arrests being made and employees boasting about faking sickness to watch sports on TV
We have a range of internet safety posters, pictures and videos to help you explore the above objectives.