They said what?!

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers.

Planning and setting up this activity

• Find out about Safer Internet Day and this year's theme on UK Safer Internet Centre website. 

Set the scene

1. Ask whether anyone has heard of Safer Internet Day and what they know about it. 
2. Explain that it's a global initiative that encourages young people, families, and communities to work together for a better internet. It's the UK's biggest celebration of online safety, and each year has a different theme. You can find out more on the UK Safer Internet Centre website. 
3. Together, as a group, come up with a list of ideas on how we use the internet in our everyday lives.
4. Discuss how, with all these examples, we can think of both good and bad experiences we’ve had online while doing them.
5. Explain that the game everyone’s about to play is all about how we interact with others online.

Play the game

1. Give everyone a piece of paper and ask them to fold into 4 pieces, so it forms a concertina.
2. On the first fold, everyone should write the first person involved in the online conversation. This could be someone they know, or it may also be a name of a generic role in their lives, such as a family member, someone at their school, or a stranger. Whoever they write down, they need to keep it a secret.
3. Tell them to fold the piece of paper over, so that the name written is not visible. They then need to pass the paper onto the next person in the circle.
4. On the next section of paper, ask the group to write the second person involved in the conversation. Again, fold this over, so it’s not visible, then pass it on.
5. On the third section, write where this conversation is happening. It could be a social media platform, a video call, over an instant messaging service, on a game, or anywhere online they can think of. As before, once finished, everyone needs to fold it over and pass it on.
6. On the final section, write what the conversation was about, this could be as silly or as serious as you’d like it to be. For a final time, fold it over and pass it on.
7. Go around the group and ask each person to completely unfold their paper and read out to the group what is on the paper. They should say ‘My conversation is between ... and ... they are talking about ... on ...
8. Discuss each conversation, what might it be like? Would you like to be part of that conversation? What sort of behaviour might the people be displaying? How should they behave? Is there anything they can do to make it safer?
9. Once finished, you could chat through what people should do if they encounter these conversations in real life. You can find advice on Childline’s Staying Safe Online website, BBC Own It and the NSPCC’s Keeping children safe online website. You may want to share these with parents and carers for their young people after the session.