The internet is essential in 21st century life for education, business and social interaction. As children move up through the school their access to various types of technology increases and it stands to reason that their exploration and curiosity increases too. The positives of the digital world overwhelmingly outweigh the negatives but children, schools and parents all need to be aware of various online risks.
Your help is still needed to prevent children accessing inappropriate material at home by way of filters and parental controls. Look below at our extensive list of links and resources for Parents/Carers, Teachers and Young People to help you with your child’s online safety at home.
How to use the internet safely:
Keeping children and young people safe online is one of the biggest challenges facing society today and it is all of our responsibility to ensure that children are educated to make positive, informed choices when they are online.
The CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) logo pictured here is on a lot of social networking sites. It is the Advice, Help and Report button. Clicking on it will take you to their website, where you can easily follow links for help if you are a parent or child. It is excellent, so please try it now!
Highly recommended is the Thinkyouknow website. Click the image to go to the website and get the latest safety information.
This is an education initiative by CEOP - the UKs national law enforcement agency that focuses on tackling sexual abuse of children.
This contains detailed information regarding specific topics such as social networking, online grooming, gaming and downloading.
A simple and effective way to get involved with your children and their lives online is through discussion. Why not use our conversation starters for parents and carers to get the ball rolling? Click on the picture above.
CBBC Stay Safe is a super internet survival guide for you and your child/ren. Here are the tips and tricks you'll need to stay safe online, beat the cyber-bullies and become a super-surfer.
NSPCC Share Aware Campaign
Launched in January 2015, this campaign aims to raise awareness of how to help your child stay safe on social networks, apps and games. They have a useful guide to the social networks young people are using on their Net Aware website:http://www.net-aware.org.uk/
Visit Google's Safety Centre to learn how to change Google's search settings to SafeSearch filtering:http://www.google.co.uk/familysafety/tools.html
This setting is designed to screen sites with explicit sexual text and images that you don't want your child to stumble across when browsing the internet.