Child Safety and Web Publishing Policy

This section will address issues regarding your role as a publisher on the Internet. It will heighten your awareness of the potential dangers when publishing information to a worldwide audience. In particular, it will challenge you to focus on the possible consequences of publishing materials that may be inappropriate.

An example of possibly inappropriate material may be a photograph and profile of a child in your class. While there are many reasons that such publishing will enhance this child’s self-esteem, motivation, and application, the dangers may outweigh the potential benefits. For a full discussion and guidelines on developing a Safety Statement in relation to I.C.T. in your school, please refer to the the Scoilnet safety pages (go to http://www.scoilnet.ie, follow the Teachers and then the Internet Safety for Kids link).

In the details pages, we discuss known dangers and make some suggestions as to how you might deal with them. If at the end of this awareness process you feel that a school web site is too dangerous to publish, and that you never want your school to have one, then the aim of this document will have failed. Our purpose is to show you how to maximize the use of I.C.T. in the classroom while keeping the children’s safety as a firm priority.