As the new school year gets underway no doubt there is a lot of planning and preparing happening, and for many of you classes have already started!

One of the many things your school may be thinking about is digital technologies, and how they can be successfully implemented and integrated in a way that maintains student (and staff) safety and encourages the development of digital citizenship – the skills, knowledge, and values required to be an effective, ethical and safe user of ICT.

N4L provides a number of supporting tools and services to help schools create a safer online environment as part of your N4L Managed Network connection package, and these can be tailored to suit your school’s individual needs.

But like many schools, you may be unclear about what your needs are this year or even where to start to work out what they are – every school has its own unique needs and what works for one school may not work for another, so the tools you use to manage your online environment, and the way you use them, may be different to how other schools do.

The start of the school year is a great time to think about how you can develop the safe and responsible use of digital technology for learning, and with Safer Internet Day happening today there’s no better time to do it.

A great tool to help you determine your needs is the NetSafe Kit for Schools. The Kit has been developed to helps schools to address student cybersafety and support digital citizenship. Based on the Learn:Guide:Protect (LGP) framework it outlines seven practical steps required to produce a cybersafe learning environment with digital citizenship at its core. The kit is free and is available to all schools via the NetSafe website.

You may also find more great resources from NetSafe and other organisations to support digital citizenship in Pond.

For questions relating to the Kit contact NetSafe (0508 NETSAFE or [email protected]) or for information about how N4L’s services can support your digital environment please contact the N4L Helpdesk on 0800 LEARNING or at [email protected].