Voice NewsSafe Internet Practice for Children, Autumn 2011

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EditorialWelcome to our Autumn 2011 Voice News on Safe Internet Practice! This newspaper is designed to pro-vide you with industry updates, news and valuable tips on how to ensure that our children use the Internet safely, but also effectively. In this edition we will be talking about current developments in Safe Internet Practice in the UK, conver-sations and resources generated by celebrations of Anti-bullying week and general tips for your daily work. We hope that you will enjoy this copy and join in with our conversations on-line and off-line.

Sylwia Presley, editor of Voice News on Safe Internet Practice

Protecting our families on-lineBack in summer 2011 we were asked to express our opinion on the tips published in the infographic you can see on this page. Despite the fact that we are social web advocates we also believe in maintaining a healthy habit of information verification;) For many parents and teachers those points might serve as a good starting point in establishing a safe work environment for children, but this visual is very much focussed on technical solutions. To ensure that my own feelings about this material do not overshadow the general pur-pose of it, I have asked the Voice di-rectors to share their point of view. David Dixon responded: "The most important thing is constant commu-nication with your children about safety (whether online or out in the streets) so that they understand risks and know when to come to talk with their parents or teachers. Many of the particular suggestions made by Zone Alarm concern gen-eral computer security and are sensi-ble enough in themselves. Their sug-gestion that parents should ‘decide’ where children go online and should ‘monitor’ their children’s social me-dia settings are entirely impractical; if they have a mind to it even young children can access the internet from multiple locations, including smart-phones, and can set up many social media presences using aliases. Us-ing automated controls on comput-ers at home and at school is a good idea, although soon enough children work out how to get round them. Zone Alarm is a software company so it is no surprise that they focus on software, but technical solu-tions cannot be an alternative to

parents having a trusting and open relationship with their children." Euan Semple added: "An odd mix of tech advice and paren-tal advice with minimal overlap! I am really not convinced that there

is anything special about the Internet in terms of relationships with your kids. Keeping them safe is about understanding the world they live in, helping them understand what safe is, and feeling comfortable with

coming to you for help and advice. Get parents interested in the Inter-net instead of making them paranoid about it and don’t sell your virus pro-tection software off the back of the paranoia you are helping to spread!" I think that some of the points men-tioned are useful but only if com-bined with insightful management of our trusted relationship with chil-dren. We would love to hear what you think about this infographic!

New Facebook Privacy SettingsThis story is taken our of our Quick Tips series avaialable for free at http://www.slideshare.net/nfpvoice

So how do we ensure that we have done everything to protect younger generations but also support them in confident web usage? Let's take Fa-cebook for example - many current reports prove that children are on this social network despite of it's of-

ficial age limit (13). Facebook repre-sentatives admitted that they have to delete 20,000 accounts each month for that very reason. The best way forward in this case is to embrace the technology, sit down with children and discuss the realistic mechanisms of safe web usage. That also means that we, grown ups - specially ITC teachers, have to be up to date with current developments. Below is just an example of skills we need to em-brace and share with our children. * Facebook privacy settings have been updated recently. They are still available from a few levels of our user interface, so we hope that this quick guide will help you use the network safely. It is crucial to un-derstand the implications your be-haviour in this social network will have on your friends, so please make sure you check and set up your pri-vacy settings. Be considerate when you manage your contact lists, pro-vide access to your content and your network and when you upload content related to your networks.

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Facebook privacy settings have a few levels of access. You can ac-cess most options from the top right corner of your screen. (For specific settings please check our presentation on SlideShare) The new privacy settings give us more control over the content we share and over our own per-sonal information, but the safety of yourself and your network de-pends on you – please manage your contacts, all your settings and post responsibly. For more follow: www.facebook.com/fbprivacy www.facebook.com/fbsafety

Supporting our work with statsAdditional information about all mentioned reports can be found at http://kidsintech.posterous.com/

On a daily basis conversations about social media in primary schools are not easy - we know, because we host Safe Internet Practice workshops for primary schools: we talk to pu-pils, their parents, their teachers and school management too. However, it becomes increasingly important to at least open up the discussion with children about how they use Internet on a daily basis. As ICT teachers you might find it easier if you have a strong ammunition of statistics and reports up your sleeve. Internet security company AVG has recently released their fourth report on kids usage of the social web. They have found that in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zea-land, UK and France a majority of parents with eleven year olds ad-mit that their kids are accessing mainstream social networks (please check the infographics on this page for more stats from this report). Released in November 2011 Min-tel report states that half of all children aged 7-12 (in the UK) visit social networking websites - and nearly half (49% or an esti-mated 0.97 million) of those who do, go on Facebook ‘every day’. Ofcom report on kids media us-age published in October 2011 brings interesting insights: "Social networking activity has not increased since 2010 - 3% of 5-7s, 28% of 8-11s and 75% of 12-15s have an active profile. One third (34%) of 8-12s have a profile on sites that re-quire users to register as being aged 13 or over, unchanged versus 2010". Whereas earlier, in 2009 according to the EU Kids Online Report social media usage by kids was on the rise: "Children’s use of the internet

continues to grow. Striking recent rises are evident among younger chil-dren, in countries which have recently entered the EU, and among parents. This last reverses the previous trend for teenagers especially to outstrip adults in internet use. Long-standing gender inequalities may be disap-pearing, though socio-economic in-equalities persist in most countries." These are just few reports avail-able on-line for free download so we strongly recommend running regular on-line search and keep-ing up to date with new research.

What can be done?There are many levels of support we can provide to children to ensure that they use the web effectively, but safely.

First of all there is a lot happen-ing on the level of EU and national policies. Digital Agenda programme run by the EU has strong roots and delivers great results. In 2009 Euro-pean Commission announced "Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU" signed by twenty one compa-nies to date: Arto, Bebo, Dailymo-tion, Facebook, Giovani, Google, Hyves, Microsoft Europe, MySpace, Nasza-klasa, Netlog, One, Rate, Sky-rock, VZnet Netzwerke, Stardoll, Su-lake, Tuenti, Yahoo! Europe and Zap. This means that companies provid-ing free on-line services do their best to ensure that their networks protect kids privacy. Additionally, the EU runs regular research to ensure that those companies actually live with the rules they have signed up to. Just from the recent report we learn that: -Eight out of the nine sites tested provide safety information, guid-ance and/or educational materials specifically targeted at minors (all except Windows Live). In Windows Live the information provided was aimed rather at parents or guard-ians, although it could also be eas-ily understood by young people. -Dailymotion, Flickr, Habbo Hotel, Yahoo! Pulse, Skyrock, Stardoll and YouTube provide safety information for children and parents which is both easy to find and to understand. -By default, only in one of the nine services tested could profiles of mi-nors be found by name searches ei-ther via internal or external search en-gines (e.g. Google, Bing or Yahoo!)." In the UK, governmental support to parental controls on various devices led to increased popularity of those on all major telecom networks. Talk-Talk has announced recently service which combines all devices used in

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your household to access the web in their parental controls system. Social media experts worry that pa-rental controls will actually cause more harm than good, as they lead to unclear practices (websites like Intelligent Life are unaccessible on T-Mobile network) and focus on technical prevention as opposed to education and building of trusted re-lationship between teachers/parents and children. Parents on the other hand - at least in the UK (according to recent study conducted by the cell-phone information and price com-parison site Recombu.com) think that mobile phones should not be used by kids under 12 - out of 2,000 respondents 75% agreed that mo-bile phones allow unlimited access to the web, leading to high bills etc. As educators we need to ensure that we use a wise mixture of all possible solutions to lead our pupils to safe, but effective Internet usage.

Local initiatives - local support#Antibullyingweek is a great place to start!

Anti-bullying week celebrated in November was a great opportu-nity for many teachers interested in Safe Internet Usage to access valuable resources, case studies and discussions. In the end it is the cy-ber-bullying policy that lies at core of safe Internet practice for pupils at our schools. Here at Voice we have seen endless amount of great links, posts and tweets so we have collected them all for you. All you need to do is go to http://storify.com/presleysylwia/antibullying-week-in-the-uk to find them all. We have also been asked about the unclear story of Sharon O'Brien. This teenage girl posted a photo

of herself on Facebook, which was followed by huge traffic of abusive comments but also interesting on-line reactions in relation to cyberbul-lying. She is alleged to have commit-ted suicide. Finally it was suspected that the entire affair was started by one of the UK's leading antibullying charities - Anti-Bullying Alliance. The charity denied the accusations on their official fan page. We have asked @Mashable, the leading so-cial media blog, to investigate this case, but so far we have no feedback. This is just one of many examples of situations where social media can be a source of many types of behaviour and the only trusted source remains the branded page of an organisation or verified profile page. Equally it can provide us with a field for discus-sion and good case studies. Discus-sions about cyberbullying continue under #antibullying week hashtag on-line, so do check them out. And if you need a template for your specific policy I would strongly sug-gest "Schools and Settings e-Safety Policy Template 2012" over at http://www.kenttrustweb.org.uk/.

Thank you! Thank you for reading our Voice News on Safe Internet Practice. We hope you have found it useful and inspiring. If you are interested in more resources please refer to our blog dedicated to this topic over at http://kidsintech.posterous.com/ and on our main website www.nfpvoice.com.

Sylwia Presley @presleysylwia sylwiapresley@nfpvoice.com