COMPUTING AND E-SAFETY
Children at Greenfield & Pulloxhill Academy use the internet on a regular basis as part of their learning. For pupils in Years 1, 2, 3 and 4, Purple Mash is our computing scheme of work. Purple Mash provides a wide range of different technological experiences using a variety of tools, with the different units facilitating deep understanding of computational concepts and providing opportunities for pupils to apply and extend their understanding and make links in their knowledge and capabilities.
In school, pupils only interact online with each other and members of staff.
In addition to Purple Mash, websites that pupils regularly access include Supersonic Phonic Friends, Accelerated Reader, Times Tables Rock Stars, National Geographic, BBC Bitesize, CBeebies, Busy Things, 2Simple, Twinkl, iPlayer for Newsround and English Heritage. All websites accessed by the children are pre-researched by teachers. The children know that they are only allowed to access these pre-researched websites.
The Department for Education’s statutory guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education, requires schools to ensure that appropriate filters and appropriate monitoring systems are in place, and to regularly review their effectiveness. It also requires schools to do all that they reasonably can to limit children’s exposure risks from their IT system. Through our internet provider, Insight IT Simplified Ltd., Netsweeper internet filtering and monitoring is implemented in our schools. As part of their responsibility as a provider to education in the UK, Netsweeper has completed the required UK Safer Internet Centre Provider checklist and is a member of the Internet Watch Foundation. Netsweeper uses a tiered filtering and monitoring, AI-based technology, methodology, performing dynamic content analysis over identified categories, and is multilingual. Specifically, through Netsweeper, illegal online content is blocked, and, similarly, inappropriate online content is blocked.
We recognise that no filtering systems can be completely effective, and our filtering and monitoring is supported with good teaching and learning practice and effective supervision. In school, we have regular 'e-safety' activities to remind children of the importance of keeping themselves safe online and behaving appropriately.
Please click this link for Parent On Line safety tips.
The Academy's Acceptable Use E-Safety policy can be viewed by clicking the link here.
We can only be successful in keeping children safe online if we work together with parents to ensure the E-safety message is consistent. Children in Years 3 and 4 and parents and carers are asked at the beginning of each school year to sign our acceptable use of the internet agreements. Click here to view the agreements.
Please see the weblinks below to give you more information about keeping safe online. There are lots of good ideas for all ages!
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CEOP is the organisation that you would use if you wanted to report anything that you or your child has seen, which has child safety issues. |
Home and Family Guidelines
Keep virus and firewall software up to-date.
- Remember that passwords should be kept private and not shared with others.
- Agree as a family your guidelines and rules. Remember that sometimes what is acceptable for an older child is not necessarily acceptable for a younger child.
- Regularly discuss online safety and go online with your children.
- Enable your ‘browser safe’ search option and / or consider using internet filtering software and child-friendly search engines. Click here for instructions on setting Google Safe Search on your computer
- If possible, keep the computer in an area of the house where you are able to monitor your child’s activity.
- Talk to your children about why they should not to give out their personal details. If they want to subscribe to any online service then make up a family email address to receive the mail.
- Encourage your children to use moderated chat rooms and never to meet up with an online ‘friend’ without first discussing with you. Remember that other devices, such as a Playstation or Xbox allow children to contact other people over the internet who they may not necessarily know.
- Time spent online should be monitored.
- Encourage your children to tell you if they feel uncomfortable, upset or threatened by anything they see online.
- Remember, any image, sound or text that has been uploaded can be copied and viewed by everyone.