News about Be Internet Awesome

This Safer Internet Day, we’re announcing new initiatives to ensure that kids and families have the tools they need to create a safe, healthy and productive relationship with technology. This includes a $20M commitment from Google.org to support leading youth focused organizations like Highlights Magazine, Sesame Street, and more.

We’ve heard from parents, educators and experts on ways to make technology safer for kids, and we continue to incorporate that feedback into our products. Whether it’s helping them find quality content, working to protect them from online harm or teaching them how to be good digital citizens, we’re committed to building family-friendly tools to help kids safely and confidently explore the online world.

A year and a half ago, we launched the Be Internet Awesome program to help kids be safe, confident explorers of the online world. We built a little something for everyone: a curriculum for teachers, resources for parents and an adventure-packed online game for kids. And we couldn’t have done it without help from partners like the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), National PTA, the David's Legacy Foundation, and Disney’s Wreck It Ralph film “Ralph Breaks the Internet.”

In real life (or IRL, as my son reminds me) I work hard to ensure my child is safe, confident, and kind. And whether he's chatting with friends, doing homework or playing games, I want to make sure the same is true whenever he’s online. To make that happen, it’s up to me to have the right conversations and provide the right tools to guide him on making smart choices, no matter where he is.

Be Internet Awesome—our digital safety and citizenship program for children—is now available to more than 400 million Arabic speakers as Abtal Al Internet. The program is designed in a way that simplifies the world of internet safety and digital citizenship in a language children feel comfortable with. Developed in collaboration with online safety experts like the Family Online Safety Institute, the Internet Keep Safe Coalition and ConnectSafely, the program offers tools for parents and educators so everyone has the tools they need to help children be safer online.

Be Internet Awesome helps kids be safe, confident explorers of the online world. Today, we’re launching a number of enhancements to the program, including curriculum expansions, updates to the Interland game, and interactive slide presentations to bring program lessons to life, created in partnership with Pear Deck. We’re also excited to make these important lessons accessible to more families by expanding the Be Internet Awesome program into Spanish as Sé genial en Internet. We’ve invited Araceli Gomez, a STEM educator at South Gate Middle School in Los Angeles, CA, to talk about why these resources are so important for her community.

At Google, we believe in technology's ability to unlock creativity and create opportunity, but it’s our duty to equip our users with the tools and resources to make safe choices online. Last year, we surveyed more than 200 teachers in the UK to learn about their experience with online safety in the classroom. We found that teachers believe children should start learning about online safety at age seven, and 99% of the teachers we spoke to felt that online safety should be part of the curriculum. More than one in three teachers also reported that they’d witnessed an online safety incident (sharing personal information or cyberbullying, for example) in their classroom.

When I was a kid, my family couldn’t afford a computer, so I’d only get to use one in my father’s office, for a few minutes at a time. When I was a little older, we got a computer at school—one computer, for the entire school—and I was able to spend a bit more time with a PC. Fast forward to 2018, my daughter is walking around her middle school with a computer in her pocket that enables her to connect to the internet and use apps at any time. Even as a parent at a tech company, it’s hard to believe that this has become the norm: Most kids get a smartphone by the time they are 10 years old, and more than 77 percent of kids 6-12 years old are using them on a weekly basis.

As a parent, I’m constantly talking with my two daughters about how they use the Internet. The way they use it to explore, create and learn inspires me to do my best work at Google, where I lead a team making products that help families and kids have positive experiences online. But for kids to really make the most of the web, we need more than just helpful products: We need to provide guidance as they learn to make their own smart decisions online.