IT Suite

With all the children spending more and more time on computers in the school and at home it seems important to share how we keep the children safe at school and ways to do the same at home.

The children all have email addresses on the internal network, on which they email each other and occasionally teachers and other staff by mistake!  Before being given their addresses the class discuss how to use emailing safely and acceptable messaging.  Every child signs a contract agreeing to certain rules, relating to safety such as not emailing strangers and not giving out personal information, as well as agreeing to send only positive messages.  Safety when emailing is extremely important, therefore younger children should always be supervised when using an email address, a good way of doing so at home is for parents to control the password access to sites such as hotmail.

It is important not to rely completely on content advisors to restrict what children can access; some sites are unrated and are not always flagged up.  Google is also a tricky area as all the children love to research using the search engine, but once it is an agreed site you also need to change the search preferences on it or the children can access inappropriate content even with the content advisor on.  We spend a lot of time talking with the children about acceptable internet usage and will be putting up a ’Children’s Bill of Rights for the Internet’ wherever they can access the internet in school.

Anyone who wants further information of child safety on the internet a good website is: http://www.tiscali.co.uk/protection