E-safety News

Happy Half Term everyone. I hope you have a well deserved break.

Here’s a round up of things that have popped up this week:

1. Below is an infographic report from the Children’s Commissioner about young people and pornography. There are some interesting statistics in it and it shows that children in KS2 are likely to experience or hear about porn. This has implications for us in the classroom and we need to be prepared to tackle questions or talk in the yard.

https://assets.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wpuploads/2023/05/CCO-Pornography-and-Young-People.pdf
2. Chat GPT – you must have heard about this by now. The name “GPT” stands for “Generative Pretrained Transformer”. The model has been trained on a huge range of text data, allowing it to generate human-like responses to a wide variety of questions and prompts.
This is a link to an interesting article by SWGFL about how content creation can change using this feature.

https://swgfl.org.uk/magazine/chatgpt-the-future-of-content-creation/

3. Digital Matters has produced a new resource with ChatGPT and other AI resources in mind. The idea is that they explore the ways they can use artificial intelligence (AI) and other tools to support their school work (instead of doing it for them).
Explore the new lesson here.
4. I don’t often promote buying resources, but I’m making an exception for these SSNAP cards made by Ineqe. The Safer Social Networking Activity Pack (SSNAP) resource facilitates OFFLINE learning about ONLINE risks. They are an educational game built to help safeguarding professionals, parents, carers and young people understand social media platforms and digital threats. I have used them and at £48 they are a good investment I think.

https://ineqe.com/products/ssnap/

5. Thanks to Adam at Biddick Hall Infants for a heads up on a new game that kids are playing. It’s been thought of as another Poppy’s Playtime, Huggy Wuggy Bear, so will probably be something that will pop up in playground chatter.
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On the google play store it is signposted as being suitable for 9+ Garten of Banban is a game by the Euphoric Brothers. It is part of the horror genre of games, and is the Euphoric Brothers’ 8th game. Garten of Banban is set in Banban’s Kindergarten. The Kindergarten was closed due to recent cases of all children attending the Kindergarten going missing. In the game, the Player, who is presumably a mother who, after getting tired that nobody can find her missing child, decides to go into the Kindergarten and find their child and other missing children themselves. But they slowly start to discover the horrifying secrets of the Kindergarten.

6. BBC Microbits – register for your FREE PACK OF 30 if you haven’t already done so.
REGISTER NOW BY CLICKING HERE

That’s all for now folks!

Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/nightclublinx/8904441110

A round up of some of the e mails and information that have come in to me this week:

1. The STEM network have just released a fabulous assessment resource. This collection contains electronic versions of the summative assessments in the Teach Computing Curriculum for KS2, covering 11 topics within the computing curriculum. Each link enables teachers to duplicate a copy of the question banks into their own Google or Microsoft accounts.
Here’s the link:
https://www.stem.org.uk/resources/collection/522342/key-stage-2-summative-assessments

2. SWGFL have a great offer – why not stock up now. For a limited time only, get FREE printed online safety leaflets delivered to your school by using the code IMfreeshipping at checkout.*

Resources

Made to share with students or teachers, display around school, or send home to parents, there is a range of topics to choose from. Get guides about screen time, online hate, child-on-child abuse and more. Free guides for specific age groups and stages of education are also available to order.

3. Report – Remove tool
Report/Remove is operated via the NSPCC’s Childline service using the skillset of the Internet Watch Foundation and you can find further details HERE. Please share this with your students as appropriate.

4. The continual media reporting of people like Andrew Tate combined with the algorithms used within the likes of social media means that misogynistic content is everywhere. Internet Matters have put some great resources together to help with this, including a video, where children might see this type of content online, terms to know and tips to tackle misogyny. You can find all the resources HERE. There is also really good information and advice in relation to tackling online hate and trolling which you can find HERE.

5. There have been quite a few updates to TikTok over recent months so it may be worth considering sending out this updated guide to parents which includes family paring, digital wellbeing, privacy and more. You can find the updated guide HERE.

Happy Friday everyone

The NWG Network  are committed to the fight against criminal or sexual child exploitation and supporting victims and their families who are subjected to the horrors of exploitation in all forms. They believe that if they can make more people aware by joining together on  National CE Awareness Day, we can improve the chances of young people being heard.

Find out more here https://stop-ce.org/

Download (PDF, 85KB)

Choo-Choo Charles is a 2022 indie horror video game. The player controls a monster-hunting character with the goal of upgrading their train’s defenses in order to fight and defeat  Charles, an evil spider-train hybrid monster that wanders the landscape looking for people to eat.

‘Choo choo Charles 2’ was released on steam early in December. This is a survival horror game and has a PEGI 16 rating so is not suitable for children. If children mention that they are playing on this game, or watching you tube videos, we would discourage this as it’s not appropriate.

The developers describe the content like this:

Blood, gore, and people being eaten alive by a spider train.

Click here to access resources to support families with safety settings on their devices.