Last week, we were joined by Dave from D:Side who came in to teach us all about staying safe online. We had a great time learning about how to be safer online and, in general, Y5 were pretty savvy when it came to spotting risks online.
During the course of the session, many things stood out to me that I’d like to share with you as parents:
- 25/30 children in the class claimed to be using social media on a regular basis, using phones, iPads and home PCs (mainly, children are using Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp). The recommended minimum age for these sites is 13.
- Children who use Snapchat admitted that they follow lots of people that they don’t know.
- Similarly, on Snapchat, most children were unaware that Snapchat introduced a new technology called Snapmaps which allows other users to pinpoint your exact location. On the app, you must opt-out of this feature.
- Most children in the class thought that if you upload a picture online and then delete it, it’s deleted from the internet for good and nobody could ever see it again – this is not the case.
- When faced with a fictional scenario where someone has received four follower requests from complete strangers, only two children in the class said they would not accept any of them. That means 28/30 children were happy to become online friends with someone they did not know. The main reason children were happy to accept the requests were because these people were a similar age or had similar interests – if your child can lie about their age to set up their account, so can others.
- Many children are playing games online against people they don’t know and are striking up conversations with these people over headsets.
- There was a particular quote that stood out which many children agreed with: ‘The more followers you have, the cooler you look!’. Please do all you can to change this perception.
All of the above points apply to adults as well as children – please stress this to your child! It’s important that children are aware of this so that they don’t think they only need to be careful because they’re a child.