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 is this week’s tip:
For Parents – New Videos from Internet matters
Over the last few days Internet Matters have released two new videos onto their YouTube channel which I’m sure will be useful to a lot of parents. They are both very short, the first is ‘what to do if a stranger contacts your child online’, and the second is what to do if your child is bullied online.
Link: Video – what to do if a stranger contacts your child online.
Link: Video – what to do if your child is bullied online.
Infinite Scroll – Growing Up on TikTok
Revealing Reality have released their newest report, Growing Up on TikTok, and as with every RR report it is fascinating. The report is all on one web page and towards the top you can view a 60 second video which shows the ‘For You’ feed of a 14 year old as he scrolls for a single minute. Very useful if you have never seen/used TikTok.
The report asks an important question, whilst the value to the company is enormous, if an average child is scrolling through more than 700 short videos pers day and spending less than 5 seconds on each, what is the value to the child? As the report states, TikTok comes under the banner of ‘social’ media, but it isn’t social, it’s scrolling, often doomscrolling during the night for hours on end.
There’s a lot of detail in the report as well as case studies which would be very useful for classroom discussions, such as Tom who is 15 years old. Tom spends 6 hours and 39 minutes online per day on average. Just over 4 hours of that is on TikTok, he sees around 945 videos and most of these are watched for less than 5 seconds. Unsurprisingly, 20% of these videos are ads.
Link: Revealing Reality – Infinite Scroll – Growing Up on TikTok report.
