E-Learning and E-Safety

The course aims to introduce tutors/managers to the issues involved in making information technology safe for learners - whether they are children, young people or adults.

The course will:

• Provide a guide to the many resources available on the internet.
• Help tutors to give advice or prepare lessons which cover the major issues of e-safety.
• Enable managers to consider what their organisation's response to the issues should be.

Each section of this course has some introductory comments or definitions which will put the material into context.

The Resources in this section:

Explanation of cyberbullying and suggested responses followed by a web quiz (for young people - but interesting for tutors to look at)

Web links to cyberbullying help sites, mostly for young people, but some resources for staff.

Social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Digg have had huge growth over the last 2 years. Many people use them as a way of keeping in touch with friends and family, and some tutors are using them as an alternative learning platform, but as with all technologies they can be misused. The resources here look at how they can be misused and include a guide to using social networking sites by Bebo.

Teaching about internet safety is more complex than road safety. There are more issues to cover and there are technical elements to being safe. It's not sensible to attempt to cover every issue. Also too much information in too much detail will only lead to fear and confusion. The teaching approach has to be proportionate to the risk involved and should bear in mind the digital literacy of the students and their existing knowledge of the issues.

So for students in FE there may need to be more emphasis on social networking, copyright and plagiarism issues. For adults there would be more on personal and financial security and keeping PCs free of viruses. While for parents there is a need to keep them aware of child protection issues.

Fortunately there is a huge range of resources available for teaching about e-safety, some of which are pointed to in the course materials above, so there should be no shortage of appropriate resources. Many of the resources are also backed by teaching plans and sample lesson plans.