Protecting our Children Online

Dear OLA Families,

As a key component of our Child Safe practices all classes will be participating in Cyber Safety online sessions.  We present these sessions to our children to best support them as they again look to be active digital citizens throughout the 2022 school year. 

The sessions are led by Marty McGauran, (Inform & Empower) who many parents will be familiar with through his CyberSafety presentations and ‘Beginning School’ presentations with Carley McGuaran.   Class teachers will support the sessions as led by Marty and will continue the school's positive approach to establishing well considered online/cyber safety practices.

As a means of providing our children with scaffolds to be safe online and act as responsible digital citizens we have implemented a new cyber safety program using Linewize, an internationally recognised company that has demonstrated excellence in this area. 

Through it’s school management system called ‘Family Zone’ we are now able to identify and address the individual online behaviours of all students when they are accessing school devices, whether at school or off site.   In addition, we have the capacity to have holistic views of student activity to allow the school to observe trends in behaviour and in particular, indicators of students exhibiting improper or risky behaviours.

These online behaviors include:

• Red Flags – Highlight students attempting to access inappropriate content, VPN usage, risky/harmful internet searches etc. recent examples include searches for adult content, violence, self harm and substance abuse.

• Peer Activity Comparison – Allows the school to set an ‘expected’ pattern of internet usage for a particular group and monitor ‘actual’ usage, identifying least compliant users.

• Video and Search Monitoring – Review all searches being conducted by a student, or can review aggregated concerning or risky searches across the whole school and can identify students most frequently attempting to access inappropriate content.

• User, Content and Policy Dashboards – See users most frequently attempting to breach rules, most frequently blocked content types and which policies users are most frequently trying to breach.

How do we, school and parents in partnership, find a way to shape children’s online behaviours and development to ensure they leave school as responsible digital citizens?

These challenges, that both the school and parents face, relate particularly to the following issues:

• Attempted access to adult and pornographic content.

• Inappropriate language behaviour through chat rooms, email and messaging.

• The use of the device for entertainment purposes during learning time.

• Use of the device well beyond 9.00pm with some students still using their device beyond 12.00am midnight (in the event a family has a school device at home like we did last year for Remote Learning)

In consultation with our Digital Technologies and IT consultant, the School Advisory Council, and school leadership, we have made changes to the functionality of student learning devices.

Significant changes to student access to their OLA accounts 

Parents please note that there will be significant changes to the access that children will have to their learning devices when students are logged in through the OLA accounts.    In consultation with school leadership and the School Advisory Council we have made changes to:

• The hours in which the student accounts can be accessed.
• School Holidays - there will be no access 
• Weekend Access during the school term - access through school devices/logging on through school domain - devices can be accessed from 8.00am-11.00am and 3.00pm-6.00pm. This allows access to devices for children throughout the day to devices but also encourages time off screens.
• School Days - access through school devices/logging on through school domain - devices can be accessed from 7.30am through to 7.30pm on a school day - at all other times there will be no access. There should be no need for children to require a screen after 7.30pm.

The content/sites that students can access

• The sites that students can access will be restricted.   Other popular sites such as Netflix, that can no longer be accessed, will need to be accessed through family personal devices/TV etc.
• We remind all parents and children that the school devices are first and foremost learning devices.   Therefore educational content should be the priority for usage.    But we also recognise that the children benefit from accessing some positive entertainment sites - eg. Disney Channel.   We also recognise that school age children should not be accessing digital technology/screens into the night.   Therefore there are times in which the student accounts are closed.  

Whilst the school has made a significant investment in placing parameters around student access to technology it is the responsibility of each family to monitor access to screens/sites of each child.  Digital devices should be accessed in rooms in which parent supervision and guidance can be guaranteed.  Bedrooms should be ‘no go zones’ for children accessing devices. 

Communication with Parents and Children relating to Unsafe Behaviours

We will be making contact with parents and children when we observe any online behaviours that we deem to be unsafe.   This will include online activities involving Adult Content, Violence, Substance Abuse, Self-Harm or inappropriate access to any sites of concern.    We believe that our parents would want to know when their children are searching for any content that could be deemed to be harmful.  

Parent Communication - We request that you advise your children that we can now observe their online search history when they are logged in through their school account. We are attempting to be transparent to our children in regards to our access to their use of technology.  

We look forward to communicating further with our parents in regards to how best we can support our children online and to be responsible digital citizens.  

Kind regards,

RIchard Jacques