Keep children safe online

Most of the internet safety videos on YouTube are 2, 3, 4 or more years old. This one was made in 2014. By now parents and teachers would have some good tips and tricks for keeping students and children safe online. We need to keep those practices current and public. We always need to be having online safety  conversations because the internet, devices and apps are always changing. New apps and devices can bring new safety issues. It’s important to remind children to check settings, not just fill in personal details, not broadcast where they are and then question whether they actually need to be plugged in with earphones or headsets. Talking to each other might help them to keep each other safe but they need to be encouraged to have adults to have safety conversations with too. It’s annoying some sites demand addresses, locations and phone numbers as though they were oblivious to common sense and online safety.  The UK child safety site Internet Matters had a high profile launch at the time it appeared and it’s a site which offers good advice. Pew Research Centre has current information about how parents monitor children’s online activity. There has been som rational and well thought out discussion about this on radio this week and that is a great way to keep those reminders in front of us as adults.

Look up and engage

Powerful message so you keep the balance right. Gadgets and devices are not life and not living. Just a part of it. This video puts out a good message so we keep our eyes on each other!

Cyberwise Daily

The CyberWise Daily is a media literacy site designed to help educators maintain contact with current trends and issues so they can better use technology in a classroom . It also means they are more aware of the sorts of issues which affect digital citizenship. This internet daily is very practical and features a wide range of interesting articles so that you do not feel as though you are working at learning what you need to know to be effective in a technology based classroom.

Put down your phone…

We are starting the age of reason with mobile technology. This video says it so well.

From classroom to kitchen

We are currently on summer holidays and so I have traded my classroom technology for my home technology. I’m preparing for Christmas so my kitchen has put my trusty TEL7J to work. It was a very inexpensive tablet which I have blogged about here. It is durable and that’s the main advantage in the kitchen. I am not worrying about whether it gets floury fingers all over it or if it is in the line of fire when I am cooking. The external storage doesn’t appear to be working any longer. Perhaps so it can’t compete with other tablets? It can’t anyway! It’s a limited device but in my kitchen it goes to work with recipes, YouTube cooking clips ,  music to cook by ,  quick checking of news and information and  oven timer. It’s pretty annoying it doesn’t use the external USB or card devices anymore because I had cooking videos and information on them. Maybe it’s coming to the end of its kitchen life and I’ll use my little Samsung tablet instead. A tablet is the perfect thing in the kitchen. My Nintendo DS gets used a lot too because it is durable and I have several really good cooking programmes to run on it. Eventually, I guess, they’ll build or build in purpose built devices for kitchen use. They need storage, kitchen apps , internet access and above all they need to be sturdy!