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Internet: Are You Safe?
Think you know how to be safe? See below
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 | Your E Safety Is Important
Students: When you use many sites on the internet you may be allowing your identity to be stolen or giving personal information which could be used against you. You may also suffer fraud because you may have given financial details to an insecure site. This is why we have an extensive monitoring and filtering system. Find out more about safety at home and protect yourself:
Parents: Whilst at college students use the internet a great deal but we ensure that all sites are monitored and have a complex filtering system in order that students are protected. How do you ensure your child is using the net safely and is not presenting themselves and their private lives to others who may exploit that information?
The College has always had a forward thinking approach to e safety and addressed the problem of email abuse by students a number of years ago so that now email is available only through a controlled portal which is monitored and released as needed. This stops students wasting time on unnecessary mail but also ensures email bullying is not possible via our provision.
Our internet connection is filtered via our own system at the college provided through RM and South West Grid For Learning who are the approved ISP for education in this area: it is effectively a two/three tiered filter. We are able to add sites and key words etc to the filter at any time and can filter sites at will. This can be a hinderance to teaching for a small cohort but is justified on e safety grounds.
One of the third party ways in which on line bullying and identity theft has now become a threat is through sites like Facebook. The College has banned mobile phones for over a year now, an action taken well before many schools. This ensures that voice and picture bullying cannot take place using uploads to social networking sites.
One of the ways in which more IT literate students try to get round filters is by using a proxy server. These are servers which can be logged onto and effectively by pass filters. This is athreat which many parents and carers are unaware of but it is a substantial problem with up to 400 being filtered out by SWGFL a day! The development of a solution is now being completed and will be in place soon.
The college has always followed an e safety based IT provision but we are aware that we need to highlight the dangers of social networking sites and other e elements to parents and students. To this end we have published a lead article on the topic in our college newspaper, The Reporter, to bring the attention of the Community to the need for e safety in the home. We have an e safety section on our web site and a member of the IT team has been trained re E Safety. The college will deliver more e safety lessons to all students next academic year.
We can see that sites like u Tube can be used for educational purposes and to promote e safety..in fact, as students use it recreationally at home it is more likely to hit home from a site with street credibility, but it is not available to students in college as it is not a managed site. | 
