This week we marked Safer Internet Day 2019 at St Chris with a range of activities in the Junior and Senior Schools.
In the Junior School we held a Morning Talk on the theme of permission and consent. Following that, Year 5 (E Group) used the Think U Know website to watch videos about online gaming. After that, they had a class competition, using an interactive game on the same website.
Year 3 (G Group) used Purple Mash to answer questions on a quiz following on from the Morning Talk to explore the language around permission, and Year 1 (J Group) created posters along the same theme.
In the Senior School Peer Mentors offered drop-in sessions for younger pupils to help them ensure their privacy settings on their social media accounts were set correctly.
Teaching staff attended a lunchtime briefing by digital safety expert Karl Hopwood, where he discussed some of the main ways to help keep children safe online, and the importance of a calm and open response to children when things go wrong, so that they are confident to talk to teachers about something they’ve encountered that doesn’t seem right, or has upset them.
Karl also ran bespoke digital safety workshops with pupils in Year 3 to 4, Year 5 to 6 and Year 7 to 8.
Karl said: “This is about education, not simply blocking and banning children from the internet. Blocking worked a few years ago, but now young people all have mobile devices which allow them to access the internet wherever and whenever they want to and so they need to know how to protect themselves when things go wrong.”
Image @herlifeinpixels
