Online Safety Weekly Update – 21st June 2023 for Schools and Colleges

“Who thinks teachers are hot?”

Over the last week I’ve had a couple of schools ask about an app called ‘W’. I had to do a little bit of digging and there is very little information apart from the fact that it is an anonymous poll app. One of the polls given on the website home page is “Who thinks teachers are hot?” This got my attention.

I decided to install the app onto my phone and what I found is concerning. I input a false name and gave my age as 51, at which point the app used the GPS on my phone to show me all the primary and secondary schools in my local area, as well as how many students in those schools were signed up, and the app then allowed me to connect to ‘my school’, as a 51 year old!! Notably, the primary schools seemed to have more users than the secondary schools.

You are then invited to allow access to contacts on your phone (which I didn’t do), at which point you can then start taking part in polls.

You will no doubt be aware of Project Evolve, the platform of thousands of free online safety resources for all key stages. 

A few days ago SWGfL put out their annual report concerned with the current state of online safety education with those schools using the platform.There are some interesting findings in the report, including consistent knowledge gaps and strengths. For example, there are consistent strengths in understanding online relationships, self-image and identity, but there are consistent weaknesses in security, privacy and managing online information. Personally I think one of the reasons for this is that there has been a significant focus from Govt., DfE and others into relationships etc. (with good reason) but there has been very little focus on security, yet security is vital to understand. Usually when I’m talking to students in secondary/college I will focus on various aspects of security yet within those topics I can also ‘inject’ safeguarding information. The reason for this is that students are much more likely to listen and take note if something is going to affect them personally (e.g. theft of data).

“Ask what they want, give them what they need,” is a mantra that I always use. In other words hook students in with a topic they are more likely to be interested in, and use that subject to inject information that you know they need to know.

You can find the full Project Evolve report HERE.

Dual screening  is when someone uses multiple devices or screens at once. For example, quite often when talking to students about gaming, they will say that they play their online game on one screen and have Discord open on the other screen to chat with their friends. The concern is in relation to attention, in other words is the use of multiple screens (e.g. looking through your phone whilst watching TV) having a negative impact?I think the jury is still out on this one, different research projects have given different results but what does appear to be common is the increasing use of screens for any purpose is leading to greater health issues due to a more sedentary lifestyle. I’m not sure we need research to tell us that, but what we do need to understand more is whether dual-screening is having an impact on concentration, e.g. multi-tasking. Lots of people think they can do two things at once but the reality is that only a tiny percentage of the population can multi-task effectively, for example doing homework whilst watching or listening to the TV.

Internet Matters have put together a good article with some advice which you may find useful to send out to parents. You can view the article HERE.