For BBC Learning, Safer Internet Day isn’t over in 24 hours, and this year we scheduled a whole week of activity across television, radio and online under the banner of ‘Be Smart’.
As well as our own feature-packed website we received great coverage from The One Show, Breakfast, 5Live and Woman’s Hour – Be Smart was a truly great BBC collaboration. We also worked with Radio 1 and CBBC to produce online safety content which met the needs of their specific audiences.
How to Be Smart Online
We wanted to capture the experiences and concerns of young people as they grow up online, so our production team spent a week at St Margaret Ward Catholic Academy in Stoke-on-Trent.
Students were invited to step into our Be Smart video booth to share their experiences of dealing with online pressures and offer their advice to other young people.
Across more than thirty films we heard stories about the pressure to join in online dares, cyberbullying and obsessions with posting selfies and getting approval on social networks.
Sharing great tips
Many of them have learned from their experiences and shared some great tips for others struggling with online problems.
We were also very privileged to have child online safety campaigner Lorin LaFave support Be Smart. Her son Breck Bednar was 14 when he was murdered a year ago by a man who groomed him over an online gaming server.
Lorin is determined to make sure other parents don’t have suffer her heartache, and urges parents to report suspicions of online grooming or bullying to CEOP. This is a service run by the police offering advice on how to raise concerns about inappropriate online behaviours.
BBC Learning also commissioned Populus to research the pressures that children and young people face online. Over two thirds surveyed had experienced or witnessed some form of online bullying.
Find out more
You can find all of our BBC Be Smart content here, including clips of some famous faces sharing their advice for dealing with online problems – Gary Lineker’s got some top tips on dealing with Twitter trolls!
www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/0/31429919
