Online Safety Tips for Parents

As we move into Level 3, many students will remain at home and continue with Distance Learning.
We have put together some survival tips for families to help out with digital learning at home.

Distance Learning tips from your school: 

• Be involved in your child’s online activities. 

• Ask questions and sit alongside younger children when they are doing live activities like video conferencing or other forms of social media.

• Keep devices to family spaces like the kitchen or lounge if possible, so the screen is visible to you. 

• If children are doing online video calls from a bedroom or office make sure everyone knows they are online. This will protect your family’s privacy as well as allow you to monitor your child. 

• Keep track of how much time your children spend online during the day. Children should be taking regular breaks from their screens as they would at school. The learning programme should be a mixture of online and unplugged activities. 

Be aware that most social networking sites have a minimum age for users aged 13 years and over. 
You may need to monitor your child's activity on such sites. 

For more tips, NetSafe offers great advice. Take a look at 7 Steps for Whanau.
This is a fully comprehensive plan for you and your family.

More recently NetSafe has published - The best online safety tips for lockdown,
and this is also worth reading over.

Contact NetSafe: 

If you’re concerned about the immediate safety of you or someone else, please call 111.
If you want help or expert incident advice, you can contact us.
Our service is free, non-judgemental and available seven days a week.
Email help@netsafe.org.nz
Call toll-free on 0508 NETSAFE (0508 638 723)
Online report at netsafe.org.nz/report
Text ‘Netsafe’ to 4282

Filtering Unwanted Content

Do you have filtering of your internet at home? 
If you are not sure, you can check with your internet service provider eg. Spark.
If the answer is no, then now would be a good time because Network 4 Learning (N4L)
which is your child’s school filtering company and the Ministry of Education is offering
filtering in your home for free. It’s called Switch on Safety.
Please follow the above link to find out more.

An easy alternative for students using Chromebooks would be a free extension called TinyFilter. TinyFilter is a light-weight web content filtering application which monitors browser activities and blocks inappropriate or offensive content.

TinyFilter also provides a password to unlock the filtering function. Click here to watch how to install and set up TinyFilter.

Here is a link to the Google Doc, you are welcome to make a copy and modify for your school.
Here is a link to PDF Copy.