18 | EDTECH CHALLENGES FOR 2015 | PRIMARY AND SECONDARY
“Will the digital divide continue? Absolutely – unless access and funding is provisioned for those schools lacking.” Justin Beck
networks offer new opportunities for collaboration and how to be discerning in interpreting digital content. It’s the responsibility of teachers, administrators and parents to use these learning opportunities to address cyber bullying and other inappropriate online activities through these digital literacy efforts. When sharing best practice on online behaviour etiquete, we must directly call forth the risks to young students of sharing information online, communications expectations and how to treat one another. While there are improving monitoring technologies for administrators and parents, the best defense is offence – by raising awareness among students and, just as importantly, giving students a safe channel to a trusted adult – teachers, administrators etc – if they are being victimised.
Brian Fischer: Greater access to e-learning can be seen as a benefit or a curse. The opportunities to support students’ learning are vast, particularly if the school supports the student's own devices, enabling anytime, anywhere learning to take place. However, the opportunity for cyber bullying obviously increases at the same time. The only way to minimise this, is to ensure that students, staff and parents are all aware of the implications. Students in particular need to believe that this form of bullying will be taken just as seriously as any other form, and that the school will take any allegations seriously, with sanctions as appropriate.
Simon Harbridge: Online bullying is a societal problem, it’s not confined to schoolchildren, and everybody should take awareness and responsibility very seriously. Tackling e-safety begins at home, with gentle boundaries and careful instruction. It’s a school’s responsibility to keep its pupils as safe as possible from all forms of online risks, but that can only happen effectively when it’s backed up by all those involved in a pupil’s life both in and outside school. From a technology perspective, schools should
already be implementing simple measures such as the CEOP ‘report abuse’ buton on their website and Virtual Learning Environment. Ofsted says that monitoring across a school’s network facilitates a whole school approach to e-safety. Schools that will be tackling this problem effectively in 2015 will be investing in the right monitoring software, designed to detect key words related to topics concerning potential risks. Faculty staff are provided with definitions of the terms picked up so they can deal with violations. Awareness is key – schools should be as open and sympathetic as possible, and so should their technology suppliers.
David Tindall: The introduction of e-Safety to the National Curriculum this year shows moves are being taken to help tackle the increase in online risks to the young, and that’s good. It’s equally important that schools develop individual policies around what works best for them. All schools are required by law to have e-safety strategies in place and some are already working closely with bodies such as the Online
Protection Centre. What is worrying however, is a recent report showed
that “nearly a third of teachers say they do not feel confident teaching online safety, while two in five say they have never atempted any lessons in the subject.” *1 Whilst I firmly advocate the teaching of e-safety in
schools and agree it’s not all about blocking access, but allowing children to make informed decisions, I also believe we have a fundamental responsibility to go a step further in protecting our impressionable youth. Schools Broadband has recently partnered with
Lightspeed Systems which offers the most advanced filtering technologies that have ever been available to schools. Sophisticated filtering and proactive reporting on areas such as suspicious search queries
*1 htp://
www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11128104/Schools-not-doing-enough-to-address-online-safety.html
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