Last Thursday, I joined chairman of the school governors, Bryn John, and a group of parents for an ITC-related evening at Catwg school. PC Mark Harris, schools liaison officer, gave a talk, illustrated by a DVD from CEOP about the dangers of sexual predators on the Internet and other ways in which children could be at risk. The scenarios in the DVD, and some of Mark’s anecdotes, were frightening. There were two messages I brought back from his presentation: parents should get more involved, and that however deeply children were drawn in, it was never to late to tell.

Afterwards, we saw how computers were being used to help children’s learning and spoke to teachers about this. The interactive whiteboards were very impressive.

Coincidentally, Liberal Democrat News next morning reported on a visit by party leader Nick Clegg to Google UK to discuss internet safety.

Update 2009-3-24: Gary Lewis of Maesteg passed on the following items:

Yet again, web safety has hit our TV screens following a situation involving a 12 yr old girl on a chat page.  She was chatting with what she understood initially to be a 13yr old lad, but following the way the chat was going she mentioned it to her teacher at school as they were discussing web safety in school.  The teacher became suspicious and reported it to the police who have now traced it to Holland and believe it may be an older person doing some grooming.

Following this I thought a number of you might have children or grandchildren that could be at risk and hence I believe in making people aware of the situation and hopefully point you to some useful sites.

One mentioned on TV this morning was www.missdorothy.com and the safety page is –
http://www.missdorothy.com/more/safety_tips.php
The above site is more geared to girls but the “rules” are basically unisex, and if anyone finds any other useful sites, if they let me know I will always forward them to others. 

Web safety is paramount.

Another useful site is http://www.getsafeonline.org/ and is well worth a visit if you have any doubts whatsoever.

I hope you found this information helpful, and please feel free to pass it on accordingly.  If you do “forward” the email then please remove any email address that appears on your copy.

Also, when sending an email to several people, it’s better to ‘Bcc:’ the emails rather than send ‘To:’ as then it doesn’t broadcast everyone’s email address to all and sundry.  This preserves each individual’s anonymity and protects their ID from possible spam emails in the future.

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