Every school year, more classrooms move online, more homework happens on a Chromebook, and more kids carry a device in their backpack. That’s a good thing – digital tools open up learning in ways a textbook never could. But it also means the conversation about online safety can’t just happen once in an IT orientation. It has to happen at home, at the dinner table, and in the classroom, again and again.
Google’s Be Internet Awesome program – built for schools and families alike – breaks digital citizenship down into five simple habits kids (and honestly, most adults) can hold onto. Google’s own launch video below is a great two-minute intro to the program before you dive in:
We’ve pulled together the highlights below, with a few practical starting points for Kenyan families and schools navigating this together.
1. Be Smart About What You Share
Kids don’t always grasp that a post, photo, or comment doesn’t disappear once it’s online – it becomes part of a permanent digital footprint. The habit worth building early is a simple pause-and-think: Would I be okay with this being seen by someone outside our family?
A useful family exercise is separating what’s shared inside the household from what’s shared outside it, location, travel plans, and even exciting news like a new sibling on the way are often things worth checking with everyone involved before posting.
At school: Teachers can reinforce this by talking through real (age-appropriate) examples of oversharing before assigning any social or collaborative online project.
2. Stay Alert. Not Everything Online Is True
Search engines are incredibly good at finding information fast. What they can’t do is tell a child whether that information is accurate. Media literacy – asking who wrote something, why, and whether the source is credible – is quickly becoming as important as reading itself.
A simple family habit: when your child searches something, take two minutes to look at where the answer came from together, not just what it says.
At school: This pairs naturally with Google Workspace tools students already use for research — a great moment to build “source-checking” into normal assignment routines rather than treating it as a separate lesson.
3. Keep Your Secrets Strong
Passwords are still the front door to a child’s digital life – email, school accounts, games, social media. The habit that matters most isn’t complexity for its own sake; it’s never sharing passwords, not even with best friends or siblings, and using long, memorable phrases turned into a strong password rather than a short, guessable word.
A fun way to build this as a family: turn a favorite quote or memory into a password together, using the first letters of each word, then swap a few letters for numbers or symbols.
At school: Encourage students to treat their school Google account the same way they’d treat a locker key – theirs alone, never lent out.
4. It’s Cool to Be Kind
The internet doesn’t distinguish between kindness and cruelty, it just carries whatever we send. Kids are far more likely to “take the high road” online when they’ve practiced it at home first: reading a message out loud in a certain tone, noticing how differently it lands than intended, and talking through it.
Just as important is raising upstanders, not bystanders, kids who know that supporting a friend being targeted, quietly or publicly, is one of the most powerful things they can do online.
At school: This is where Google Workspace for Education’s built-in safety and content controls genuinely help — but they work best alongside, not instead of, these conversations.
5. When in Doubt, Talk It Out
Perhaps the most important habit of all: kids need to know, without hesitation, that if something online makes them uncomfortable, there’s a trusted adult ready to listen – no judgment, no immediate confiscation of the device as punishment for being honest.
Families that sit down together and agree in advance on what to do in tricky situations – report it, talk to a parent, or both – tend to handle real incidents with far less panic when they actually happen.
Building the Habit, Not Just the Rule
None of these five habits require a single new app or purchase, they require conversation, repetition, and a bit of patience. Tools like Google Family Link can support the process by giving parents visibility into screen time, app activity, and content controls, but they work best as a companion to these conversations, not a replacement for them.
For schools, the same five habits map naturally onto the digital citizenship expectations that come with any Google Workspace for Education or Chromebook deployment, which is exactly the kind of groundwork we help schools lay when we roll out devices and accounts for a new academic year.
Want to Go Deeper?
Google put together a full Be Internet Awesome Family Guide covering all five habits in more depth, with talking points, vocabulary, and activities you can work through together as a family. It’s a free, ready-to-use resource, no sign-up required.
At Zila Tech, we work with schools across Kenya to set up Chromebooks, Google Workspace for Education, and the admin controls, including Family Link and content filtering, that help these conversations stick. If your school is thinking through its digital safety setup, get in touch and we’ll walk you through it.