“It was all about bringing awareness of online safety and the importance of knowing if you post a photograph onto a space, it’s not as safe as you think.”
A Co Down school has gone viral thanks to a social media experiment highlighting the importance of online safety.
Earlier this month, Donard Special Needs School in Banbridge set up a digital boundaries ‘Social Experiment’ by posting a photo online via Facebook and requesting friends and family to share it to determine how far it would travel around the world in one week.
After 24 hours the school had gained over 210,000 views and it has been viewed in many different countries across all the continents.
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Junior teacher, Arlo Keery, who is behind the experiment told Belfast Live: “I’m a junior teacher but I take the RSE curriculum which is your relationships and sexual health education. As part of that, I do a weekly lesson with the leavers and at the minute we’re learning about boundaries, so we’re talking about physical boundaries, emotional boundaries, social boundaries.
“As an experiment to consolidate Digital Boundaries, we wanted to identify how far our Facebook post could travel around the world in one week. We asked our followers to like and share our post with family and friends, stating where in the world they were from and we then marked off on a world map how far our post had travelled.
“This was an amazing teaching opportunity to show our pupils how quickly an image can circulate and raise awareness of the importance of having an understanding of online safety and respecting your own and others’ digital boundaries.
“It was all about bringing awareness of online safety and the importance of knowing if you post a photograph onto a space, it’s not as safe as you think.”
Ms Keery added: “Since we posted this on our school Facebook page, it’s been viewed everywhere – Kuala Lumpur, Koh Samui, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand absolutely worldwide so it’s just to consolidate that what they post isn’t safe on the one platform, it can go viral.
“We sort of surmised we’d maybe have about 50,000 views in comparison to what our other posts have had but to be at over 300,000, we’re all gobsmacked, it’s fantastic. The experiment’s just exploded, it’s been amazing.
“I’ve seen other people on Facebook, saying things like ‘share this and let the kids see’. We do have kids that are on Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram and I don’t think they understand the complexities of how far an image can go.
“I’m the admin on our Facebook page and it gives you a lot of the statistics around the amount of people who have shared our post and only 4% of them actually follow our school so 96% of them are strangers to us.
“It’s bringing such a buzz to my department in the school. They’re all so engrossed in this and checking daily. It’s been lovely for our wee school to have this happen. It’s been such a good teaching platform for the kids. The parents have all got on board too so it’s caused a real hype within our whole school community.
“I just think it’s such an important message for online safety because there’s so many social platforms out there that our children are interested in and they’re curious about and just to let them know that yes, they can be safe if you’ve got all the correct settings etc but they’re not as safe as you would think they actually are.”
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