The Importance of E-safety and Appropriate Online Behaviour
The 2008 ‘Byron Review’ www.dcsf.gov.uk/byronreview emphasises the key role that schools must play in equipping pupils to stay safe on-line. It highlights how schools should educate children in e-safety with particular regard to Conduct, Contact and Content.
Schools should take a proactive approach to e-safety. The Byron Review recommends that senior managers ensure that ‘e-safety is mainstreamed throughout the school’s teaching, learning and other practices’. Whole school planning is essential to ensure that schools fulfil their duty of care to pupils.
The Byron Review also recommends that,
E-safety and media literacy should be embedded across teaching and learning, not ‘bolted on’.
Teachers should ensure that pupils are provided with opportunities to develop knowledge and understanding of e-safety and acceptable online behaviour. In the Levels of Progression for UICT, e-safety is not presented as a separate assessment criterion. Rather it is intended that it should be integrated across the curriculum at a level appropriate to the pupil. Consequently, the Levels of Progression include the following explicit statement:
Pupils should demonstrate, when and where appropriate, knowledge and understanding of e-safety including acceptable online behaviour.
Netiquette is a term that is used to describe acceptable and appropriate online behaviour. Some characteristics of this behaviour include:
- being courteous;
- being diplomatic;
- showing sensitivity to others (including cultural awareness);
- using acceptable and appropriate language;
- using acceptable and appropriate content; and
- publishing acceptable and appropriate content.
Schools should emphasise the dangers of pupils compromising themselves and others to a global audience via social networking sites, personal web pages, blogging etc.