Why it is important to teach pupils how to act safe on the internet!

Children of today are surrounded by computers or smart phones. Almost every home has one or several computers with internet installed. Children also use computers in school. With this topic in mind, we can easily understand that parents and teachers have many challenges by teaching how to act safe in the digital world.

This video about social networking can give you some good advices about using the internet in a safe way.

A lot of kids are using the internet every day. The belief in their skills in using the internet in a proper way, are often well developed. They are familiar with the life in social medias as Face book etc. As society we need to show and teach pupils a safe behaviour in the use of internet. In the subject social studies we often discuss this theme. We talk about limits of age. It’s a paradox when you are working with kids who are nine, ten or eleven years old and they have their one profile at Face book, when  you know you have  to be thirteen to make a profile. Have the parents approved this? Is it ok to tell a lie to get access to a website that you not are old enough to be a part of?

We also have discussions about the content of one`s homepage. What do you write about yourself and which pictures do you present?  A lot of the pupils do not know that information and pictures laid out on the internet, often remains in “space”, even though you have removed it from your website. Some young people also seem to like photos where they act more mature and older then they really are. Some of those pictures may have a sexual tendency. (This link is to a popular Norwegian website where you post your own pictures.) Is this ok when you after some years are an adult employing for a new job and the boss are searching the internet for information?

Another important issue to discuss in class is harassment of other persons on the internet. Some kids write and post pictures on websites that are meant to hurt the feelings to someone else. We all know how easy it is to manipulate pictures so that nobody can see it’s a fake. People who have been exposed to this type of harassment, often says that the worst part of it is to experience how difficult it can be to make such elements disappear forever. Digital harassment is not a big problem only in Norway. We have to fight this problem all over the world. As a part in this work, the EU has created a forum called “Safer Internet Forum”.

In October 2011 the title of the meeting was:"Every European Child Digital Safely – Emerging Challenges and Youth Engagement".

On the agenda for this conference several of the issues were the same that I have pointed out in my blog post. This tells me that it is very important to take this work seriously and continuing teaching how to act safe in the digital world.