Every week e-safety adviser Alan Mackenzie sends me weekly updates. They are useful teaching resources but also parent guides to keep you up to date with current trends.
Here are a few tips from this week’s updates:
Children’s Wellbeing in a Digital World
Internet Matters have released their new report for 2025 and there’s some really interesting findings. On the positive side the report finds that children are more open with their parents about online activities, and parents’ awareness of their children’s online activities has increased.
But on the negative side, the wellbeing scores for vulnerable children have risen to their highest level with 24% saying that upsetting experiences happened to them quite a lot, up from 10% last year.
You can read the full report HERE.
Video – GenAI, The Harms Landscape
Children and young people are often the first to adopt new technologies, often out of curiosity or because their friends are using it. As generative AI is embedded more and more into all of our lives (whether we want it or not) there seems to be a huge surge of ‘this new solution can save you hundreds of hours of work a week’ and other related products, but very little of the real concerns that are associated with GenAI, including concerns to children. This is particularly important when you consider that 1 in 10 children report they know of cases where their friends/classmates have created synthetic intimate images (deepfakes) of other children using GenAI and around 1 in 8 knows someone who has been targeted.
This is a whole new landscape of concern: the days are gone when it would take someone hours in something like Photoshop to create an obvious-looking fake, these tools are incredibly easy to use and often free.
Mark Bentley from London Grid for Learning has put together a superb 11-minute video which introduces the AI harms landscape. This would be useful for staff training and sending out to parents. You can watch the video on YouTube HERE.
For Parents – Wearable Tech
More and more children are being given technology that can be worn, e.g. smartwatches and whilst there can be benefits the risks aren’t always apparent. This article from Internet Matters explores wearable technology for children and gives advice on:
- The different types of wearable tech, e.g. smart watches, glasses, VR headsets and fitness trackers.
- Whether wearable technology is safe and what some of the concerns are, e.g. privacy and data collection, impact on body image.
- How wearable tech can support wellbeing.
- And more.
You can find the article HERE.
For Parents – Under 5’s
As more and more younger children get access to their own or borrowed tablets it’s important to make sure these devices are set up correctly and children are using age-appropriate apps/games. Internet Matters have a great set of resources for parents of these younger children which you can find HERE.
