Internet Safety Day
Earlier this week, in between demo sessions, a mobile smackdown and a press conference, I joined a bunch of colleagues to join a citizenship project at Microsoft. We went to schools throughout the country and spent a couple of hours talking to 8-year old kids about the dangers of internet and cyber bullying. Not that we went out to scare them, au contraire! But as the internet users get younger and younger, it’s very important to give them a proper training about the world wide interwebs and what lives ‘in there’. The focus of the sessions I gave at the school I went to with 3 other colleagues, was on how to create a safe password, how to protect your identity and personal data and how to behave on social networks. The sessions always closed with a talk about cyber bullying and how to react to it.
I must say I was impressed of the variety of online activities and knowledge amongst the 4 classes I taught. They were all 8 year olds, but where in one class everyone was on Live Messenger and in posession of an email address; in another class there would only be 5 or 6 out of 20 who had online activities. You could really see that it was due to peer pressure that groups of children joined a social network like netlog, or that they met after hours to chat or voip-call with each other. Most of the online activities included gaming, sending funny mails and chatting. Exceptionally they would do ‘research’, but if they did it would be on Wikipedia.After 5 hours of standing up in front of different classes, my respect for teachers had grown quite a bit, since my feet started to hurt and my back too. I can only imagine how this feels day in day out for 7 hours in a row…
Here’s a snippet of the e-mail our GM sent around:
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[…] more than 60 colleagues who volunteered in schools to provide child online safety training for 8-12 year old children.
Microsoft Belux is partnering with Child Focus, Actions Innocence, the Gezinsbond and ISPA to raise awareness about Online safety.
Our volunteering activities today mark our strong commitment to child online safety. Online safety is not only a central element of our business practices and corporate environment, but it is also an issue that our employees, many parents themselves, take very seriously. As a company we put a great deal of faith in our technology, but we are also aware that the tools we provide have to be used responsibly and that safety education is one of the most effective means of helping to protect children online.
[…] No less than 23 Microsoft subsidiaries across Europe are organizing employee volunteering activities for Safer Internet Day 2009. Through local partnerships with NGO’s and schools, around 800 Microsoft employees will train more than 50.000 people on online safety, and through Microsoft collaterals and local advertisement campaigns more than 6 million people across Europe will be reached throughout the year.
Below is a list of guidelines on how to deal with cyber bullying:
