Invicta Vlogs
Safer Internet Day 2018 Digital Leader Blog
On Tuesday 6 February, it was Safer Internet Day 2018 around the country. Safer Internet Day is run by the Safer Internet Centre and aims to teach people about: The Internet, how to stay safe online, dangers on the internet and ways to prevent the spread of harmful items onto your device. This years’ theme was ‘Create, connect and share respect: a better internet starts with you,’. This change to make the internet more positive can come from individuals, schools, organisations, law enforcement and the internet industry itself.
To honour Safer Internet Day, Invicta Grammar School did assemblies throughout the day in order to convey the theme for this year. The idea of online and offline lives was considered and importantly, how students can behave in a positive way online, so that everyone has a good experience when living and playing in the “online” world.
The Year 12 and 13 assembly was run by Year 12 students, Alex and Amy. The Year 10 and 11 assembly was delivered b by Clara, Maddie, Ellie and Emily, volunteers from Year 10. The Year 9 Digital Leaders ran the assemblies for Years 7 – 9; Patricia, Ashleigh, Hannah, Rhiannon and Megan were supported by Mr Ehren and Mr Eke. As most students walk into these sorts of assemblies thinking “it’s another safer internet assembly,” we were faced with a challenge to get the message across to our peers! However, we were prepared for this and we had devised a number of activities to get students involved and to get our message across. The assemblies included filling an ID card using details readily available from a person’s FaceBook page. This showed how easy it is to gain someone’s information, and perhaps even their password, using clues obtained from their social media account. There was an explanation of what is meant by the term ‘Digital Wellbeing’ and how to work towards achieving this. We considered how easily we can be distracted by looking at our mobile phones. To involve students, there was some live voting to see how students conduct themselves online and finally an exercise demonstrating the power of ‘Fake News’. These activities were led by the student representatives in each assembly and all the assemblies were concluded by Mr Ehren who taught us the dangers of being distracted by our mobile phones, whilst Mr Eke explained what Cookies are and to clear them regularly.
Overall, it was an engaging and interesting day in which students learnt many different things and heard a number of thought provoking ideas.
Thank you to Mr Ehren and Mr Eke, as well as all who presented, for their hard work involved in these assemblies.
Looking ahead, we would like everyone to consider stepping away from their mobiles, tablets and social media for a time and to consider doing the Invicta Grammar School “Set Your Hands Free” campaign, where we will encourage everyone to take part in a digital detox; put down their devices, so as to set their hands free and gain themselves some space away from the digital world – more details will follow in the new term!
Hannah and Patricia
Year 9 Digital Leaders
