The Byron Report

We at Softease have eagerly anticipated the publishing of The Byron Report which has been commissioned to look at the risks to children from potentially harmful content in computer games and on the internet.  

Ewan McIntosh, as usual has made some excellent points in his blog and highlights the positive thrust of the report whilst hoping that the potentially negative interpretations are not leapt upon by certain parts of the media. Much of the media comment this morning highlights the gulf between young adults and their parents, with too many parents having little or no idea what their children are doing when they are at their computer or games console.  Doug Dickinson has links to much of the press comment on his blog and will no doubt be waxing lyrical on the topic later in the day.  There are oodles of DVDs, CDs, reports etc. informing parents on many aspects of e-Safety, the problem is, not enough parents are engaged enough to pick them up and watch, read or listen to them.  Perhaps the report’s recommendation to provide better information and education to children and families will go some way to resolving this.

Having just launched Honeycomb, our collaborative suite of online tools for pupils, we believe we will be vindicated in the approach we took over twelve months ago when we sat down with teachers to begin to design the system.  With Honeycomb we believe we have created a solution which harnesses the web 2.0 experience for pupils, giving them the extended audience which we know motivates them.  But we have kept the experience ‘real’, there is no approval or mediation, publishing their pages means just that.  Pupils can try out different ways of presenting their work, they can switch from creating pages to collaborating on a wiki quickly and easily.  Teachers, however, stay in control and publishing and reviewing privileges can be quickly removed, a powerful sanction in our experience and one which pupils will not typically abuse.In the schools that have used Honeycomb one of the biggest benefit we have had reported is that pupils love being able to access their work from home and to show it to parents, carers, grandparents and so on. There have been specific instances when parents have been in to school to comment on how engaged their children are.  Our belief has always been that Honeycomb will strengthen the links between school and home, and if that means that pupils and parent/carers start to spend some time online together then we will be delighted. 

We will watch with interest for the broad reaction to the report.