Home School Links

Parents can play a key role in promoting e-safety at home. ICT offers the opportunity for young people and their parents to learn together, and e-safety is an excellent topic for encouraging home-school links.

Childnet has produced a CDROM for parents Know IT All for Parents which is currently distributed free of charge to state maintained schools in England – Find out how to order copies. The multimedia CD-ROM encourages parents to talk to their children about the internet, and in order to support the whole community, a summary of the advice has been translated into Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Polish, Mandarin, Punjabi, Urdu and British Sign Language.

Know IT All for Parents also includes material produced by young people themselves, and an Activity Centre with quizzes and games that parents and children can do together.

View the contents of the CDROM online

Childnet International also produces a range of materials – as part of its schools awareness programme, Kidsmart– to help schools share information on e-safety issues. Resources include leaflets, books and a series of downloadable fact sheets covering topics such as:

• mobile phones
• searching the internet
• chatting online
• internet addiction
• your family and spam
• putting photos on the web.
  

Childnet also provides a 54-slide PowerPoint presentation which can usefully be shown at parents’ evenings. A multimedia version is also available. For further information, see the Childnet International parents’ support website www.childnet.com/safety/parents.aspx and the Kidsmart website www.kidsmart.org.uk.

NCH Action for Children also provide a range of information for parents, including Dick and Dom’s Get IT? Got IT! Good!: a family guide on getting to grips with technology, produced in association with Tesco Mobile and Tesco Telecoms. For further information, see the e-safety section of the NCH website www.nch.org.uk/itok.

The ParentsCentre website has a variety of detailed e-safety information, including information on the benefits of home access to ICT, issues to consider when buying a family PC, developing a family code of practice, and health and safety issues for home ICT use www.parentscentre.gov.uk/usingcomputersandtheinternet.

The NetFamilyNews is a regular newsletter and blog designed to keep parents informed of the latest child relevant developments concerning the internet and related technologies. Although US in origin, it gives a good overview of current and emerging issues, particularly in the areas of social networking, online gaming and mobile phone use. It is distributed via email, blog and RSS feed, or available online www.netfamilynews.org.The resources matrix on this site indicates some other sites which also provide information for parents and carers.

Reproduced from ‘Signposts to Safety:teaching e-safety at key stages 3 & 4’ with kind permission from Becta