3 tips for educators when teaching about online safety

Remember that feeling of total confusion when Snapchat filters became all the rage and you had no clue what anyone was talking about? Yeah, me too! I thought I was quite up to date with apps and social media until as a Headteacher I did an activity with my staff to name popular apps children use. Turns out, my “expertise” stopped at Instagram. This got us all wondering: how can we protect and educate children on apps even us adults don’t know about?

The answer we arrived at was to educate children on the principles of online safety. rather than digging into specific apps because there are just too many! We took 3 key steps to promote this and explain the benefits and dangers of social media.

1. Specifically teaching about online safety

We integrated digital literacy into the curriculum as an essential step in promoting online safety. We asked our most online savvy educators to design lessons that teach students how to critically evaluate online content, identify reliable sources, and distinguish between fact and fiction. We used form time to deliver this and reinforced this with real life case studies that could be shared by our year leaders. Giving powerful real life examples, sourced from the NSPCC among others, really brought to life the need for caution.

2. Parent meetings about online safety

We sent home the same sheet used for our staff app ‘test’ mentioned above, to our parents and carers. Then we held follow up meetings, aimed at specific key stages, to offer an opportunity for parents to listen and talk about the issues they had found. The effect this had was fantastic. Parents volunteered concerns they had and specific issues they had faced that we were not aware of. We could then pull together a cohesive plan that had parental involvement. This gave a sense of synergy across our school community toward tackling social media.

3. Student social media group

The social media and online landscape is constantly changing with new threats always appearing. Of course, there are also great resources available which again can be utilised. Often, the best researchers and users of this are the children themselves. Therefore, we looked to set up a student group that could feed into the discussion and give us the latest information that was being spoken about by the students. We did not talk about specific students although some did flag up concerns they had about their peers.

Overall, our work brought together school, students and families. This trinity does not mean that young people will not have issues online but it does give educators the best chance of keeping children safe online. Education for all parties means that, though online dangers still exist, everyone has the best chance of tackling the issue and keeping children safe.