Digital Safety: Preparing your students

Unfortunately there are many dangers that face children today; from crossing a busy road on the way to school to 'stranger danger'. As teachers it is our responsibility to make sure students are aware of these dangers and teach skills and strategies to cope with dangerous situations. Digital safety should not be treated any differently. Although, as members of a generation which grew up without issues surrounding digital safety, we view these as new dangers, the 'digital natives' in our classrooms do not see a difference. They need to be taught digital safety alongside traditional safety education.

Digital safety should be taught as soon as children are using computers and the internet. There are many resources available for teachers to use to help educate students about the dangers:
•Budd:e (Australian Govt, 2009)
•Get Safe Online (UK Govt, 2009)
•Wise Up to IT (Australian Communications & Media Authority, 2008)

There are also tools that teachers can use to control the content that students are able to access. Websites such as Yubby allow videos to be imported to create personalized channels. I recently used this with a Year 3 class during a project about electricity. I created a channel (BrightSparks) with videos about various power stations which the students could then access with a username and password. I was not worried about the students being exposed to inappropriate content and it also saved time during the lesson.

The above example is useful in lower and middle primay classrooms but as students get older as long as they are educated about on-line dangers there should be no need to restrict their internet access. Restricting access, especially to social sites, may disadvantage students as we move towards a more social way of creating and sharing knowledge: collective intelligence.