Online Safety
Information curtesy of https://www.esafety-adviser.com/
Popular Apps and Games - A Handout for Parents
Drawn from the Ofcom Online Nation Report 2025 this free handy guide for parents and carers looks at the more popular apps and games used by children and young people. Specifically it covers:
- Key insights.
- A comparison of safety and wellbeing features within apps and games.
- Help and support links for those games and apps (e.g. Family Pairing, YouTube Supervised Experience etc.).
- A few of the more popular helplines.
- App/games reviews from Common Sense Media.
Schools and educational organisations are welcome to download this and send out to parents. Schools and educational organisations are also welcome to upload the guide to your own website. All I would ask is that you link the resource to my website to acknowledge the source.
Download: Popular Apps and Games - A Guide for Parents.
AI and Images
You can't have escaped all the media attention around Grok and AI images this last week. As despicable as this is, it's just the tip of the iceberg and has been happening on many platforms long before Grok, and even if Elon Musk takes meaningful positive action this issue isn't going away any time soon. We've already seen where a new AI startup essentially left their website front door open and over a million images leaked, the majority of which were explicit.
We're in a new world with generative AI where we've got the two extremes: the exceptionally good and the horrifically bad.
Included in the latter is the very real issue of explicit AI deepfake images showing teachers and students, something I have covered a couple of times in past updates, and this includes offenders scraping images from school websites to create the imagery.
This creates a dilemma: what do schools do about this, what do you do about all of those amazing images on your school website? Do you need to audit them or just remove them because of a worst-case scenario?
The answer is there is no easy answer, there is no 'solution' but there are definitely steps we can take to mitigate the risk. My good friend Traci Gregori from ivengers and I are putting a 1-hour course together which will be delivered as a webinar and pre-recorded video (to give choice). We're in the planning/developing stage right now and unfortunately there will have to be a small cost (tbd) as this takes a lot of time and effort.
If this is of interest to you let me know and I will let you know once we're ready.
AI Creep - Google for Education
A few days ago I saw a post on LinkedIn that took me by surprise. We're all aware that AI seems to be creeping into every aspect of our personal and professional lives, essentially being forced upon us by default rather than giving us the option, it now looks like Google has just turned on Gemini by default within Gmail, and this included Google for Education where you have to manually opt out.
In a nutshell this potentially means (quoted from the original LinkedIn post):
- Gemini can read across email histories and synthesise conversations.
- Answer natural questions about your Inbox
- Generate emails and draft replies.
- And much much more.
All of this sounds okay to a degree, but it raises questions such as: is Gemini being trained on our email data? Where is this information being stored and much more? Essentially all the questions we should have answers to before we adopt any new product in school, particularly AI.
If I'm honest I'm a little confused with this, there is a lot of conflicting information, including the fact that Gemini is supposed to be limited for under 18's.
Until we know more my advice (if you are using Google for Education) would be to contact your SysAdmin/Network Manager/IT Support, ask them to check at the system level whether Gemini is turned on for Gmail, and if so turn it off.
If you are on LinkedIn you can read the original post HERE along with the many comments it's generating.
For Parents - Playstation Family App
The Playstation Family App came out in Sept 2025 and it is a great way to help parents set up and manage their children's Gaming experience. Features include:
- Manage playtime.
- Activity report.
- Visibility into what children are playing.
- Approving playtime requests.
On this web page you will find detailed instructions to guide you through setting up a child account, get notified what game your child is playing in real time, approve or decline a request for extra playtime, apply content filters, privacy settings and more.