Northumberland ICT & eLearning

Getting started with School360

Tuesday 10th September 2024, choose from 11.00am & 3.45pm

If you have any new additions to your teaching or admin team, please point them towards the Getting Started with School360 session, in which we'll take you on a quick tour of the platform. We’ll show you how to manage your users and classes, how to produce login details for colleagues and pupils. How to set up houses, personalise your award points system and navigate around the various tools. From there colleagues may choose to sign up for one of the various deep dive sessions exploring tools such as Canva and j2e.

Annual Online Safety Update

Tuesday 1st October 2024 - 3.45pm-5.00pm

We recommend that all members of staff attend this session annually. In it, we'll cover key areas of risk and how to mitigate these. We'll then move on to cover recent trends, risks and key actions you can take as well as highlighting some new resources to ensure your team is up to date and prepared for the year ahead.

The CEOP Series of Six Workshops

Begins Tuesday 8th October 3.30pm

Last year KCSIE placed greater emphasis on roles and responsibilities in relation to filtering, monitoring and online safety. While this session is open to all members of your team, we'd particularly encourage DSLs to sign up for the full series of workshops which run across the school year. Topics covered include Online Sexual Abuse, Live Streaming and The Dark Web. Attendance will ensure that your DSL has a strong foundational knowledge of online risks and how to best mitigate these.

See guide for all six dates.

Cyber awareness

Thursday 11th November '24 3.45-4.55pm, online.

This session will be delivered by Maria Bartley, a Force Specialist Cyber Protect & Prepare Officer with Northumbria Police. Maria will take us through the risks we should all be aware of and the key actions we can take to protect our personal accounts and our school network. Ensuring your team understand the risks and how they can best mitigate these is a vital part of securing your network against cyber attacks.

Please email jennifer.harris@northumberland.gov.uk or jordan.graham@northumberland.gov.uk

to reserve any places.

School360 will be inaccessible for a short time during the summer break, including Google Drive and the associated apps.

This is so that our development team can carry out essential system updates.

School360 will be offline from 5pm on Thursday 25th July - 8am on Monday 29th July.

Should the work not be completed within this time frame, the system will be offline again from 5pm Thursday 1st August until 8am on Monday 5th August, although we hope to avoid this.

Canva is one of the most popular tools in School360 and has been widely adopted in Northumberland.

Canva recently announced their Glow Up. This new user experience has been rolled out to millions of users globally and on July 8th, they will be rolling out the new Glow Up experience to school teams, including our Northumberland deployment. The new Glow Up makes for a better experience when using Canva.

To ensure that you and your team are familiar with these changes in advance, Canva have developed some content and FAQs to keep you ahead of the curve. We'd recommend a quick scroll through the guide linked below, particularly the short intro video on page four.

Note - if you have used shareable links in Canva, head to your dashboard now. You should have a notification asking if you want these links to remain accessible after the update - action this asap if you have shared links to Canva projects you would like to stay accessible.

From 15th July, CEOP Education will be launching #SaferSummerTogether on social media. Six weeks of tips and activities helping parents and carers to keep their children safer online this summer and beyond.

Look out for Tip Tuesday and Family Friday posts focused on these weekly themes:

Week 1: online gaming
Week 2: socialising online
Week 3: sharing pictures and videos
Week 4: protecting personal privacy
Week 5: harmful content online
Week 6: getting help

Support and increase your engagement with parents and carers this summer by:

• Following CEOP on Facebook (CEOP Education) and X (@CEOPEducation)
• Following #SaferSummerTogether
• Sharing #SaferSummerTogether posts with parents and carers

As we move towards the summer holidays and a much anticipated rest for teachers and pupils alike, year six pupils may be feeling anxious and with so much time on their hands, this anxiety can often escalate over the summer break.

Moving schools can be a source of great worry for some children. Happily, The Salvation Army has once again released its Small Fish Podcast, where they seek to allay the fears of children going into this next developmental stage. The podcast had 2,000 downloads last year, and the feedback from educational professionals has been positive.

Give this a listen and if you think it's something that may be helpful for your pupils, share the links before the summer break or listen as a class.

Internet Matters have released two more free lesson packs exploring online hate and AI. They include lesson plans, slides and more. These are really well timed as we head toward the summer break, which for many young people will mean extra, often unsupervised, time online.

The AI lesson pack has extra relevance this week as we approach the general election with much talk in the media around AI and deep fakes.

The London Grid for Learning have developed an interactive and free downloadable board game to support KS2 pupils with learning key concepts related to online safety. As they make their way around the game board, pupils will encounter scenarios that they have to think about and respond to, as well as opportunities to discuss their own online safety behaviour.

Snapchat very recently provided further, very welcome, safety updates. These allow the user to:

• Block new friend requests sent from bad actors who were already blocked by the user, but sent from a different account from the same device.
• More frequent reminders about which friends they share their location with on Snap Maps.
• Further pop-up warnings if users add a friend who doesn't share mutual friends or is not a part of their contacts.

For full details click the link below:

Thorn advise parents to: 'BE YOUR KID'S SAFETY NET. Kids today face a very different set of challenges. There’s a whole new landscape where a child’s relationship with technology and normal sexual development overlap, with a whole new set of experiences online. And they need your help to navigate it safely.'

Thorn have some excellent resources to support parents as they navigate their child's development:

The Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2024, was recently released by The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). They have identified that 71% of secondary schools experienced a cyber breach or attack in the past year, in contrast to 52% of primary schools. Phishing remains the most common method of attack.

If you haven't attended recently, we'd strongly advise booking your full team on the Cyber Awareness training sessions provided to us by Northumbria Police and if you're a secondary school we can help you to arrange a #cyberchoices workshop which is a national programme with the aim to educate young people who have an interest in technology to use their skills safely and legally while also raising awareness of the consequences of becoming involved in cybercrime.

Find out more in the ICT and eLearning course guide.

We are delighted to now open sign-up for requests for places in next year's North Tyneside and Northumberland FIRST LEGO League Challenge 'Submerged' season. Teams will be going under the ocean as they explore a new real-world theme and develop their STEM skills!

What is FIRST LEGO League?

FIRST LEGO League Challenge is a global STEM robotics and life skills competition that is delivered in over 100 countries around the world. It introduces science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) to children aged 9 to 16 through fun, exciting hands-on learning. Each year students explore a real-world theme, fostering skills in teamwork, confidence, and learning habits. The programme includes coding, research, design, teamwork and presentation elements.

Take a look at this short video from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), who are the UK and Ireland delivery partners for FIRST LEGO League. It explains in more detail what you need to know about FIRST LEGO League Challenge.

Our loan equipment is almost always fully booked across the school year. If you haven't already done so, please get in touch to let us know what you would like to reserve for the next academic year and your preferred half term. This service is available to schools in our support SLA (1) and training is available to ensure your full team can make the most of the devices in classrooms throughout school.

Our current set includes the following:

Sphero Indi - The robot for early learners that is driven by colour

Speed into STEAM with indi—the most approachable entry-level learning robot for ages 4+. indi inspires imaginative, play-based learning by empowering kids to design and build their own mazes while creating opportunities for students to learn the basics of coding, solve problems, and nurture computational thinking skills.

Sphero Bolt - the ultimate coding robotic ball!

Designed for educators who want to inspire their students' curiosity in STEM, Sphero BOLT is a game-changing tool that empowers students to explore their creativity, coding skills, and inventiveness. With its advanced sensors, programmable LED matrix, and innovative technology, Sphero BOLT is the perfect way to integrate some fun into learning and make your classroom a place where students can't wait to explore!

Ozobots

Ozobots are desk-friendly coding robots that come with infinite ways to create, learn, and share. Program with screen free colour codes or use block based programming by connecting to a Chromebook, iPad or laptop.

Blue Bots

We're all familiar with Beebots in EY and KS1. These bluetooth enabled versions allow further challenge and interest in the classroom as children learn to sequence commands and debug simple programmes.

Microbits

The Microbit is a fantastic tool to help pupils learn to code. This versatile device can be used as a datalogger and form the basis for many different cross curricular projects. You'll find an abundance of units of work, activity ideas and resources on the BBC Microbit website.

iPads

We also have a set of iPads, already set up with the latest apps for schools hoping to trial before they buy. In our opinion, iPads are the device of choice for teachers embarking on creative, multimedia projects. Try your hand at film making, music composition, photography, podcast creation, ebooks and so much more.

Please get in touch to request support or reserve a place on any of our training sessions.

jennifer.harris@northumberland.gov.uk

jordan.graham@northumberland.gov.uk

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