Thursday 27 January 2011

eSafety ideas for schools


As promised the Redbridge LSCB eSafety subgroup have compiled a set of eSafety ideas to start the thinking going in preparation for Safer Internet Day 2011 - 8th February. Whatever age group you work with, from KS1 to KS5 here are some discussion starters, assembly ideas, lesson activities, competitions and even links to age-appropriate posters.

All the resources are available from weblinks given within the document, although some interactive resources will only work for London schools. This document is not a comprehensive list of everything, rather a start point for teachers thinking and planning for eSafety lessons.

SID2011 - School Planning



Ofsted say that in outstanding schools "In the five schools where provision for e-safety was outstanding, all the staff, including members of the wider workforce, shared responsibility for it. Assemblies, tutorial time, personal, social, health and education lessons, and an age-appropriate curriculum for e-safety all helped pupils to become safe and responsible users of new technologies."

Get everyone involved, be creative and get the message heard.

Alex Rees
alex.rees@redbridge.gov.uk

Tuesday 18 January 2011

eSafety information direct to your MLE

There are various eSafety feeds available to access. Redbridge has its own one running for this half term in preparation for Safer Internet Day on 8th Feb. It will be updated at least 3 times a day over the next few weeks allowing eSafety messages and discussion starters to filter out during this period.

The information feed is managed through the social networking system Twitter and is available to see by going to www.twitter.com/LBR_eSafety. Twitter limits information to 140 characters and so this is just long enough to give an interesting fact, signpost a useful resource or some interesting research and give the web link. Take a look at the feed to get an idea of the sort of information. (Web links are often given in their smallest possible format – e.g. http://ow.ly/3F1MU - as defined by the Twitter website being used and the code #SID2011 is used to label this piece of information as related to Safer Internet Day 2011.)

We recommend you add the feed to your online staffrooms, or with older students you may like to add it directly to PSHE pages that they access to start discussions. If you use twitter yourself you may like to ‘Follow’ the username @LBR_eSafety to get updates to your own account.

A quick 'how to’ guide if you are using Fronter

To link this feed into Fronter you need the ‘RSS feed’ code:
https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/239332819.rss

1. Go to the page where you want to the information feed to appear and add a container onto the page.

2. From the list of possible things to include in your page you will see “Inset Dynamic Today Element”. If you select this one of your options will be for an ‘RSS feed’.

3. This will add a section onto your web page for RSS feeds. You now need to click “Edit RSS Feed” which will take you to a screen where you can “Add RSS feed”.

4. Copy the RSS feed code above into the box labelled “Url to RSS”, choose a number of articles to display (e.g. 8) and don’t worry about displaying the abstract. Save your changes by clicking Save.

5. Now return to your page and you should see a set of information articles appear signposting interesting eSafety information or resources.

Last note
If you work in a Redbridge school and would like us to add the RSS feed to your online staffroom please get in touch and one of us may be able to do this for you.

Alex Rees