This morning, we held an Online Safety workshop for parents. The aim of the session was to give information and advice on how to keep our young people (and ourselves) safer when they are accessing the online world. Hannah, from the Durham Learn team, led the session by going through information about how young people are going on line, different apps that they might be using and the risks that are associated with each app. We then got some advice on how to help young people stay safe: explore apps together, encourage use of apps in communal spaces such as living rooms rather than bedrooms, use parent control apps such as use Google Family Link or Microsoft Family Safety, use safer search engines like Swiggle and talk through things with an open dialogue.
A very useful website is Internet Matters that has great guides on setting up lots of the common apps safely.
Durham Learn will be running similar sessions online in February. We will send links to book on this as soon as we get them. Many thanks to Hannah for the information and advice.