Online Safety Week in Primary School

In Week 8 the Primary School hosted Online Safety Week. This saw all students participate in a range of activities focusing on how to keep safe, to be kind and considered when using devices online. 

These experiences included Mr Whalland (Director of ICT) teaching Year 5 and 6 students about the importance of using secure passwords, or passphrases.

A range of engaging and cleverly written literature was shared across K-6 classrooms that took famous children’s stories and gave them a modern twist where the internet and device usage ruled! Highlights were ‘#Goldilocks’,  ‘The Fabulous Friend Machine’ and the eSafety Commissioners ‘Swoosh, Glide and Rule Number 5’.

Year 6 completed a Mathematics lesson with an online safety theme, where the girls surveyed each other to gather data on their online activity and then converted this into fractions, percentages and graphed their findings. 

We also welcomed a guest speaker from YSafe who facilitated workshops for each stage.

Topics featured the importance of not sharing your Protected Personal Information (PPI) online such as never using your full name in a username on a game platform. Other sessions focused on the risks associated with engaging in social media, cyber bullying and digital footprints. A strong focus for Stage 3 was of the importance of stopping to think about the impact on others and yourself before posting anything online and the need to be a positive upstander when you see things online that don’t feel quite right.  

These experiences concluded with a K-6 parent information session where Helen Dempsey (Head of Primary), Amelia McAllan (Head of PDHPE K-12), Lauren Miles (Primary School Counsellor) and Sarah Johnstone (Deputy Head of Primary, Student Wellbeing) spoke on the topic ‘Raising Your Child in the Digital World’. We thank the parents who attended this session for their interested and curious approach. It’s certainly an area that leads to robust dialogue and needs constant attention and further discussion. We’re all in this together! 

Sarah Johnstone 
Deputy Head of Primary, Student Wellbeing