Today I worked with a group of 220 15 year old girls in a local High School. Far from the ideal, if what we are trying to do is get these young people to fully engage with us so we can learn, from them, more about their on line behaviours.
My presentation is a mix of awareness around both cyberbullying and the risk from on line predators. I decided to do this, as we get very limited time to work with young people in our schools and attempt to cover, what I believe is the relevant issues in the short time allocated. As a team we are hoping to set up smaller focus groups of young people, in order to improve on our own understanding and practice around the ever growing phenomenon of on line social networking. 2 out of the 220 did not have active profiles on one or more of the more popular sites! We need to talk to these young people in order to get a more in depth view of the influence of gender, social and economic backgrounds and age development on how young people interact with the cyber world.
On the issue of engaging with parents. We to have had very mixed and normally poor response in getting parents to attend organised sessions. Anyone any ideas?

I educate children from kindergarten through high school on Internet Safety and I truly believe that we sometimes don't give children enough credit for what they're capable of. Most children recognize themselves in my presentations when we talk about the dangers of posting names, addresses, pictures, locations of schools and cell phone numbers. Many lie about their age to create accounts with MySpace, BeBo, Facebook and similiar social networking sites. I've had children as young as 8 years old tell me they lied about their age and made themselves older; some only put their age at 14 to satisfy MySpace but others put in ages such as 18, 21,25 and so on. They are smart enough to side step the rules and regulations of the site but when I honestly tell them about some of the dangers and then Google my own name, they are completely shocked that my phone number, address and a link to Map Quest shows up in an instant. Next I show them how Map Quest lays out a plan on how to get from my parents home in Florida to my home in North Carolina, complete with directions and estimated mileage. I then tell them about the tricks pedaphiles might use to lure a child, gain their trust, and arrange a meeting. One such example has to do with a child being offered a trip to Disney World since my parents home is only 30 minutes away from there, again using Map Quest directions. I've never used a child's name or pulled their social networking profile but I did have one safety program surprise even me. I once showed 8th graders how to locate registered sex offenders in their neighborhoods and around their schools, again pointing out the dangers of giving out too much info to people who claim to be a certain age. A child went home that very day and found her father on the registry! The situation was handled well by the parents, the school counselor and the administration but now I only show registered sex offenders from other states. And I always tell the children that if they want to do this on their home computers they should always ask their parents first. I do think we need to be honest about the dangers children should be aware of, but they should not be put at risk by the very people charged with protecting them. The saddest part of my job as an educator is the number of times I've tried to educate parents and they just aren't interested.The popular response is "My child would never do that." "I trust my child completely." or " They're smart enough to know better." Just ask a classroom full of kids how many of them have a personal computer in their bedroom with Internet connection and I bet over half will raise their hands. I wonder if Mom and Dad really know what's going on behind those closed bedroom doors?

Interesting responses. I feel that the sanitised version I have sometimes viewed of social networking sites from children that are used within the industry to demonstrate esafety, do not reflect real life usage by children. It seems there needs to be a balance between demonstrating real life usage and protecting identities. A dichotomy that will be difficult to reconcile. I work with an esafety group and I would love to find a way forward. Perhaps using overseas open profiles or bastardising a number of profiles (this becomes subjective on content - perhpas not good).

I do know that viewing profiles would open the eyes of parents and teachers to the world of social networking and engender conversation on how we can join in and help our children stay safe by imparting our life skills for them to apply on their virtual worlds (sorry last bit sounded a bit like a sermon!! not meant to).

Protecting the school includes

-- The introduction of educational institutions in the post of Deputy Director for Security;
-- Bringing to the protection of school security firms;
-- Procedure security firms;
-- Order the services of security firms;
-- The prohibition of access to school by unauthorized persons, including parents;
-- Introduction for students' passports security ";
-- Pay protection parents of schoolchildren.

I have occasionally used selected photographs from social networking sites to stimulate debate around "what's acceptable". I would only show a profile with permission of the creator and have used my own, but would never show the profile of someone connected to the school, or local area.
We have used live demonstration where a young person in the venue was connected to someone on line and struck up a random conversation. This worked really well and the parents showed interest when it turned out to be the school technician who was up on the hall balcony. I think this brought on line chat alive for them.

Anne, An interesting article in relation to the police officer exposing a member of the school audience by revealing her profile and amount of detail within it.

Our Data Protection Act here in the UK differs greatly from your laws and places a large number of restrictions on how we use data held. A social networking site, when the profile is set on open would mean this is an open source and we could probably display the profile as your officer did. Even so I seriously doubt whether there would be a UK based Police officer brave enough to do this.

I would like to think the use of the Child Exploitation On line Protection films during our presentations is powerful enough to encourage the students to think of their own safety but have occasionally thought of using profiles in 'parents evenings' from the children in the school where we are presenting. This would really bring home the amount of information being displayed by children and show fully how they are utilising social networking, the good and the bad.

Does anyone know of an occasion where this has been done live to a parents audience and whether this has caused any problems?