Cyber Safety Education: Towards a Cyber-Safety Awareness Framework for Primary Schools

Online and social media play a major role in children's lives, while communication devices such as cell phones, personal computers, iPads and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are enabling children to communicate effectively with each other. However, the advancement of technological systems and new software presents opportunities to criminal elements in society to attempt to cause harm to unsuspecting users. This situation is even more serious when those users are children who have not been taught how to protect themselves. The purpose of this paper is to present a cyber-safety awareness framework that can be used as a viable means of introducing cyber safety awareness education to primary school children in the South African community. The framework proposes that schools be grouped into clusters, with a cluster coordinator as its head, elected by teacher representatives of each specific cluster. Cyber safety awareness information is distributed through a series of workshops and information sharing sessions attended by teacher representatives of these school clusters, and distributed back through to parents, children and other teachers from their schools and eventually to their communities. Implementing the framework in the South African community would therefore introduce a coordinated approach to confronting possible cyber security risks and thus create a cyber safe environment for kids to work in, where currently none exists.