Nurturing eSafety at Virtual School Victoria: a Journey, not a Race (original) (raw)
Educator Joel Fraser describes his experience with eSmart Schools and unpacks how the program worked in his school’s unique context.
Virtual School Victoria (VSV) is one of the largest State Government schools in Victoria with over 6,000 students. It exists to meet the educational needs of Victorian students whose circumstances prevent them from accessing mainstream schooling. The virtual teaching and learning model at VSV has evolved rapidly to respond to the technological changes happening in society in recent times.
As a major provider of online education, we wanted to ensure that our systems were in line with wider eSafety standards. While we have rigorous measures in place to protect our students, we’re always looking to improve.
Fostering respect in an online environment
One of our biggest challenges is the limited peer-to-peer interactions, given the nature of our school. Most student interactions take place online, which reduces opportunities for in-person connections.
We are always looking to find new ways to foster safe interactions between our students. We are committed to identifying potential risks, so we can minimise them and develop strategies to better support respectful student relationships.
The power of collaboration
To strengthen our school's commitment to safety, we’ve updated our policies and provided staff with comprehensive training.
Our first step was to create a working team of key school stakeholders, including technical-development staff.
As the chair of this group, I collaborated with a range of internal stakeholders, some responsible for reviewing diverse policies and others focused on child safety. We collaborated to embed eSafety into our key procedures and policies, including child safety, bullying and cybersafety.
We have also run stories in the school newsletter and promoted key initiatives on the school’s social media to better educate students, parents and carers about how to be safe online.
Evaluation
The eSafety Curriculum Day was an outstanding success. Some key results from survey respondents included:
- 93% said the session was highly relevant to the School Improvement Plan
- 75% indicated that the relevance of the eSafety curriculum day was relevant/very relevant to their professional learning needs.
Moreover, almost 5% of staff followed up afterwards to discuss how they could make one of their projects more eSafe.
Staff engaged meaningfully in the professional development sessions, and raised important questions, which we are continuing to address as a school.
Where to now?
We acknowledge that eSafety is the responsibility of the community – teachers, students and parents/carers – and will continue to tackle this issue in collaboration with our whole school community.
Getting some of the changes made within our context will take time, but ultimately, we are seeing benefits accrue. It’s a journey, not a race.
Our school values of Empathy, Respect, Collaboration and Growth underpin our approach to tackling this significant issue. It’s an issue we care about deeply and it’s an issue we will continue to fight for.