Internet safety for the classroom: a lesson, a quiz and printables
Everything a single lesson needs, free and without an account: a poster version of the ten rules, a ten-question quiz with reasoning, a named certificate and a starter for older classes.
This part of the subject is oddly badly served. The good material sits behind teacher-marketplace paywalls or signup walls, and the free material is mostly a decade-old PDF on a school website. What a teacher actually needs is a lesson that can be assembled on a Thursday evening, and that is what this page is.
What is in the kit
Four things. A poster version of the ten house rules for the wall, stripped of the explanations so it reads across a room. A ten-question quiz that marks instantly and shows the reasoning behind every answer. A certificate that takes a pupil’s name and prints from the page. And a digital footprint quiz for older classes, which asks about their own settings instead of invented scenarios.
None of it needs an account and none of it collects anything. The quizzes calculate in the browser, which means a class can work through them without a single answer leaving the room.
A lesson that works, in the order it works in
Hand out the ten rules and ask which one their household would refuse. The disagreement is the lesson; every class produces one, and it is usually about the phone at bedtime or about telling an adult. Let it run.
Then the quiz, answered individually, and go through the reasoning as a group instead of reading out scores. Two questions reliably split a class: the one about a friend of a month asking for secrecy, and the padlock in the address bar. The second is failed by more adults than children, which is worth mentioning out loud.
Finish with the certificate, because that is the part that leaves the room. A named certificate in a school bag reaches the parents, and the parents are the half of this subject a lesson cannot otherwise touch.
The printables, and why they are not PDFs
Everything printable here uses a print stylesheet in place of a downloadable file. That means nothing sits behind an email gate, nothing needs a reader, and nothing goes stale in a downloads folder: the page prints what is on it and drops the site furniture out of the way.
It also means you can adapt before printing. Crossing a rule out and writing your own in is the intended use, and a wall poster a class helped write is observed rather than ignored.
Two age variants, and which to use
For roughly ages nine to eleven, the rules and the safety quiz as written, with the questions read aloud if reading is a barrier. The emphasis at that age falls on contact and on money, which is where the real risks sit and where classes score worst.
For roughly twelve to fourteen, keep the rules as a discussion prompt but switch to the footprint quiz, which asks eight questions about their own accounts. It works better because it cannot be gamed by guessing what the adult wants to hear, and the “not sure” answers are the teaching material.
What goes home, and why that matters most
A lesson changes what a child knows. A rule on a fridge changes what a household does, and the gap between those two is where most classroom work on this subject is lost. So the two things designed to travel are the certificate and the fridge version of the rules.
Two other pages are worth knowing about before a lesson: the toolkit holds the quizzes and the printables in one place, and the glossary defines the vocabulary in language a class can read aloud. If you send one thing home, send the rules with a line asking families to cross one out and add their own. It converts a school handout into a household decision, and it is the only version of this that survives past the week of the lesson.
If you have ten minutes rather than a lesson
An assembly slot or the last ten minutes of a form period is enough for one thing, and the thing that works is a single question on the screen: what would you do if someone you play with online asked you to keep the conversation secret? Take three answers and then say the rule.
It fits the time, needs no preparation, and it is the one pattern where recognition genuinely prevents harm. Everything else on this page assumes a full lesson; that assumes four minutes and a projector.
Questions teachers ask
Is any of this behind a login or a paywall?
No. Nothing here requires an account, an email address or a purchase, and there is no advertising aimed at pupils anywhere on the site. Everything prints from a browser.
Can I photocopy and adapt the rules poster?
Yes, for classroom use, including crossing things out and writing your own in. A class that has argued about a rule and rewritten it has learned more than a class that read a finished one.
What year groups does the quiz suit?
The wording suits roughly ages nine to fourteen. For younger classes read the questions aloud; for older ones the footprint quiz lands better because it asks about their own accounts.
Is there an answer key?
Yes, with the reasoning behind each option, not just the correct letter. It sits on the quiz page and can be read straight off the screen without preparation.
Does the certificate need a printer that does anything special?
No. It is a print stylesheet, not a document: a pupil’s name goes in, the page prints, and the rest of the site drops out of the printout.
Do you collect anything about pupils?
Nothing. The quiz marks in the browser, no answers are transmitted or stored, and there is no analytics on what anyone typed. A class can use it without any data leaving the room.