Below are some tips for the children, recommended child friendly search engines and recommended parental control apps to support our Diyar School community in being responsible digital citizens.

Tips for Children for Staying Safe Online

No matter what age our children, the top tips below are always important to constantly revisit so complacency does not set in. Children’s ability to spot red flags means developing an awareness of warning signs that may be an indicator that something is unsafe.

1) Don’t post any personal information online – like your address, email address or mobile number.
2) Think carefully before posting pictures or videos of yourself. Once you’ve put a picture of yourself online most people can see it and may be able to download it, it’s not just yours anymore.
3) Keep your privacy settings as high as possible
4) Never give out your passwords and change them regularly
5) Don’t befriend people you don’t know
6) Don’t meet up with people you’ve met online. Speak to your parent about people suggesting you do
7) Remember that not everyone online is who they say they are
8) Think carefully about what you say before you post something online
9) Respect other people’s views, even if you don’t agree with someone else’s views doesn’t mean you need to be rude
10) If you see something online that makes you feel uncomfortable, unsafe or worried: leave the website, turn off your computer if you want to and tell a trusted adult immediately

Internet Browsers

As I am sure you can appreciate finding a totally safe internet browser is difficult, but if you have parental controls on, this will make it somewhat safer.
In terms of the safest search engine for children, here are some options;

• Google can be quite safe if you set it up as such – https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/510?hl=en
• Out of the box – http://www.kidtopia.info/ is a Google custom student safe search engine indexing only educator approved sites.
• https://duckduckgo.com/ which can be used as an alternative to Google as it doesn’t store data and is more private. You can also activate safe search for duck duck go too https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/features/safe-search/
• https://www.kiddle.co/
• https://www.kidzsearch.com/

Parental controls

As the children are surfing and learning virtually at present it is good to invest in some parental control apps, so you can monitor and control sites and apps the children go on. Below is a good article and site to keep children safe online. There is also the names of 4 different apps as recommended by ‘Beat the Cyber Bully’. With the amount of technology contact at present, we would highly recommend getting one of the parental control apps, this will give you control over what the children are able to access and the amount of screen time they will have from the comfort of your phone.

• https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/parents/articles/Parental-controls/Screentime IOS-https://screentimelabs.com/
• Bark – covers 24 social networks and apps- it is 4 times more than any other child monitoring app. Youll get automatic alerts to signs of cyberbullying, depression, online predators, adult content and morehttps://www.bark.us/
• Boomerang – https://useboomerang.com/
• Ikydz – https://www.ikydz.com/
• OurPact – https://ourpact.com/