Parents

With the increasing use of ICT at home and at school, it is important for you to be involved in the educative process, not only to keep your child safe, but to help them develop safe, ethical and responsible practices.  Social networking and appropriate referencing will be covered in today’s blog on ICT safety for year 8 students. These two ICT issues will cover the applying social and ethical protocols and practices when using ICT.

Social networking:

With the increased prevalence and use of social networking sites, online chatrooms and gaming forums for young adolescents, it is important to understand to implications of these sites and forums, and identify strategies to keep children safe.

Attribution CC BY SA, Tanja Cappell

THINK before you post!
It is important for you to discuss with your children the importance of THINK before you share:

Attribution CC BY NC SA, Tom Magliery

Safety
It is important that you help your child maintain safe and secure social networking profiles. Here a few things for you to check:
- What sites your children are using: are you ok with this?
- Reporting processes for each site
- Age restrictions
- Secure passwords
- Privacy settings 
- 'Friends' are real friends

For more information about this related to individual sites, please visit this link.

Cyber bullying

One of the greatest negative implications of increased social networking prevalence and use, is cyber bullying. Cyber bullying can be more harmful than face-to-face bullying due to the increase in ICT prevalence and use. Parents play a vital role in helping their children use ICT safely, responsibly and ethically, as bullies are no longer left at the school gate. Below are some short videos that you may find helpful in increasing your knowledge about cyber bullying:

For more information on cyberbullying, please visit this link.

Three steps to protecting children online:

As parents you can help keep your children safe when they are online by using these three basic strategies:

Communicate openly with your children:
- It is impossible to monitor your children’s online activity 24/7, so it is important to find ways to establish and maintain trust.
Use technology tools:
- There are a growing number of technological tools that can help keep your children safe online within certain sites and apps, including parental controls and anti-virus protection.
Encourage safe and responsible behaviour:
- Establishing rules, boundaries and expectations regarding your child’s internet use is crucial in increasing their safety. 

For more information about these strategies, please visit this link. 

Teenagers and ICT use
It can often be more difficult to control teenagers' use of ICT, due to their increased independence and access to own devices. Therefore, it is important to consider some helpful tips:
     - Stay involved.
     - Think ahead.
     - Be proactive.
     - Support positively.

For more information regarding these tips, please visit this link and for guiding questions to start the conversation with your children, please visit this link. 

Recognising intellectual property:

Intellectual property must be recognised when it is not our own. In terms of at school, we refer to this as referencing or acknowledging sources of information. This means that when we write something or use a picture, we acknowledge that the original work is not our own, as this is a legal and ethical obligation.  

Why is it important?

It is important that you model the importance of referencing to your child. Using someone else’s work and claiming it as your own, essentially copying and pasting without referencing, is plagiarism which is a crime. At school we discuss Copyright and Creative Commons which are organisations set up to protect the work of authors, and enable legal and ethical sharing.

How to reference for school:

All sources of information need to be recognised. This includes quotations, information, pictures and logos from both internet sources and hard copy material such as books and newspaper articles. At school we use the APA referencing style and information regarding this can be found at the following website: https://www.flinders.edu.au/slc_files/Documents/Blue%20Guides/APA%20Referencing.pdf

We also use Creative Commons licensing. This resource provides students, parents and teachers with free to use licensed material. For further information on Creative Commons, please visit this link. 

ICT integration in Health and Physical Education:
Currently, in my year 8 Health and Physical Education class, my students are undertaking a unit on body image. Within this unit, there is a strong focus on applying personal security protocols and identifying the impacts of ICT in society through topics that involve the safe use of social media and analysis of digitally enhanced photos. If you would like to keep up to date with this unit and see your child's progress, please discuss this with your child and feel free to access our class' Edmodo site at: https://www.edmodo.com/. 

Further resources:
- DECD Cyber-Safety Guidelines for schools.
- DECD Consent to use media and creative work.
- Digizen website.

If you have any further questions or would like to know more information about how you can support your child’s use of ICT at home, please feel free to comment on this post or send me an email at brodieborg03@gmail.com.

Kind regards,

Brodie Borg

Graduate Teacher
Flinders University, SA