This half term, Key Stage 3 are focusing on E-Safety in their IT lessons and PD time. This week:
Our Year 7 students began learning about how time spent online can be addictive. They saw how social media has become a business, generating billions. Because of this profit, platforms and content creators are now motivated by the clicks, shares and scrolling that keep eyes on their sites. Furthermore, they have learned that the negative emotions of anger and outrage generate the most response. As a result, social media has created a negative and unhealthy climate that can spill over from the virtual world into the real lives of our young people.
Year 8 were also considering online risk, in particular the pressure to share personal information and images with people they think they can trust but who are in fact exploiting them. We repeat key messages of online safety throughout our students’ time at Bede, but as the methods of manipulation become ever-more sophisticated, we need to match the level of online threat with the strength of our warnings to them.
Year 9 were working on the issue of ‘fake news’: something that, while not new, is a growing risk as misinformation and disinformation become easier to spread and harder to identify. As real-life examples, they looked at fake news in the war in Ukraine and the Covid pandemic and the dangerous results. Next week, they will focus on how to find reliable sources of information amidst the confusion and manipulation.
