Safer April in Prague A series of events aimed at keeping children safer on the internet started on March 28th.. More than 220 children met at the Junior Internet conference in Prague. This year the conference celebrated the 10th anniversary of Safer Internet Day. For this reason, many of the competitions launched during the event focused on the history of the event and past winners. Some of them are successful entrepreneurs or university students now – and of course have an excellent track record of being involved in internet oriented competitions and with successful online experiences. The Czech national safer internet project awarded the participants of the conference with a Safer internet family toolkit.

The real start of the Safer Internet Month of April was opened by the traditional Night with H.Ch.Andersen on April 3rd. It is an event that was launched a few years ago by a local Czech public library. This year 880 libraries around the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia joined the initiative, which is becoming more and more popular among young children. Children spend an evening in the public library reading fairy tales, taking part in online quizzes and communicating with other children in other libraries guided of course by librarians. Some of the participating libraries were playing with our Family kit too.

It is very important to mention that these events were started in the Czech Republic but became famous and popular internationally.

Very important events were organized in the frame of the Czech EU presidency. First was the Children Friendly Europe conference. The conference discussed three key areas in the lives of children. The first was the subject of media and children, the second was human rights education and child protection, the third theme was positive education aimed at training children to be independent and responsible while respecting their own and other people’s personalities. The conclusions of the conference are available on the web site of the Saferinternet.cz project.

The next conference was the Safer Internet for Children ministerial conference held on April 20th . The conference adopted the Prague Declaration, which should become a very important document which will facilitate communication between European and national administrations and civic society. The declaration is available on the Saferinternet.cz web site. You can see the photo gallery from the conference HERE.

The third event was the international workshop organized by Microsoft and the Czech Safer Internet National Centre in Prague the day after the ministerial conference on April 21st . The aim of the event was to propose a recommendation for children‘s protection online, to provide education in the area of internet safety and mobile networks for adults and teachers and to find and share some effective means and tools to combat the threats that can be found. The event was organized under the auspices of the Minister of Interior with the presence of Deputy Minister Mrs. Ptackova-Melicharova, chairwoman of Microsoft Czech Jane Gilson and coordinator of the Saferinternet.Cz project Pavel Vichtera. A very interesting speech from Michael Moran (Interpol France) and Karel Kucharik (Czech Police) introduced the real problems of online crime and some ways that we might be able to help to reduce this. More info (in Czech) you find at Microsoft.cz.