Our eSmart week has seen our community learning some very important and timely information regarding online safety. Along with our students learning about eSafety in class, we also held a Parent Information Night on Cyber Safety and our School Council passed two new policies to help strengthen our ability to keep our students safe online.
Student Learning Highlights
Our Year 1’s discussed screen time and thought how important it is to balance screen time with other activities. They completed posters that highlighted the difference between a good and uneven balance.
Year 2 learnt about taking photos, and in particular, requesting permission before taking photos and posting anything online. Here is a link to a clip they watched – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy8shE919-U
In Year 5 they completed an online survey for a digital licence that tested the students’ knowledge on cyberbullying, the safety and dangers of using avatars, how to stay safe online, online scamming, phishing, copyright laws (particularly on YouTube) and malware. This survey can be viewed here – https://www.digitallicence.com.au/trial-the-quiz/
CyberSafety Night
We were very fortunate to have Leading Senior Constable Robbie Noggler return to our school to present to our parents about keeping our kids (and ourselves) safe in an online environment. This was a fantastic and highly informative session that provided thought provoking scenarios capturing the challenges of cyber safety. Robbie also shared some great tips to help keep children safe online. First and foremmost, Robbie encouraged all parents to start talking to their children about what programs they are using online so that they have an awareness of their cyber activity. Robbie shared some great slides which are attached below. Many thanks to all the parents who attended.
New Policies
To culminate our focus on eSafety, two new policies were ratified by School Council on Tuesday night.
Our new eSmart Policy provides clear guidelines in the use of Social Media by our community (staff, students and parents).
Our Online Incident Reporting Guidelines outlines clear steps for staff to follow when they are aware of an incident involving our students that has occurred online.
Both of these policies were both written to increase the safety of our children while online and now sit alongside our ICT Acceptable Use Policy and our Behaviour Management Policy. Links to all four of these are below.
- DPS eSmart Policy
- DPS Online Incident Reporting Policy
- DPS ICT Acceptable Use Policy
- DPS Behaviour Management Policy