Happy Onlife toolkit for safer internet use

Guest contribution by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission

Happy Onlife is an edutainment (education+entertainment) toolkit conceived by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission promoting a safe and responsible use of internet among children and adults. It is also used to raise awareness on online safety risks for privacy, cyber security and cyberbullying. It is available as paper version (EN, IT) and digital application for mobile and web platforms (EN, FR, IT, NL, ES). Happy Onlife is also mobile and is available for iOS, Android and Windows Smartphones https://web.jrc.ec.europa.eu/happyonlife/index.html. JRC is now inviting parents’ associations to try the toolkit, to promote it and contribute to its further development. The contents of the toolkit are very much in line with EPA’s point of view on internet use, to raise awareness rather than restrict and create anxiety.

Stop Cyberbullying - campaign in Catalonia to educate parents

Newsflash by Josep-Manuel Prats, EPA Vice President

While the EU is enforcing a directive trying to legally restrict the internet use of our children, parents’ associations in Catalonia has initiated a campaign totally in line with EPA’s policy paper, adopted by consensus of the members.

All the federations of parents' associations in Catalonia have agreed to start an awareness raising campaign the target groups of which are especially fathers and mothers. We have the explicit support of the Government of Catalonia.

Safer Internet Day 2015 - 10 February

The Safer Internet Day is celebrated around the world for the 12th consecutive year. It is the flagship event of the Safer Internet Programme supported by the European Commission, reaching millions of people in over 100 countries. On this occasion, schoolkids, parents, teachers, policy makers take time to learn, engage or discuss ways for creating a better Internet for kids. And this better Internet is #Up2Us!

"Let's create a better internet together" - Safer Internet Day 2014

The 11th Safer Internet Day is celebrated worldwide on Tuesday 11 February 2014. The theme for the day is: "Let's create a better internet together". On his day all stakeholders – children and young people, parents and carers, teachers and educators, industry and politicians – are asked to join Insafe in marking the day and working together to build a better internet for all, but particularly children and young people.

Opening Up Education: mainstreaming digital access in education and training - EUCIS-LLL policy paper

“Disruptive innovation”, “tsunami”, “first genuine revolution since Gutenberg”… a lot of hopes and fears have emerged in the past years on Open Educational Resources (OERs), making more vivid than ever the debate on harnessing the potential of ICT for education and training. While the 2013 Commission’s Communication on “Opening Up Education” strives for a new learning ecosystem enriched with digital environments and contents, we see that in reality not everyone benefits from these new possibilities. In 2010 only 39% of Europeans used the Internet for any training and education related activity with huge disparities across countries. We know that the main barriers to access to ICT are technological but also linked to attitudes, interests and abilities. In this context there is a huge potential for progress, and there are more open questions than solid answers and reliable solutions in the field; therefore a critical and responsible approach is recommended. While the European Council recently discussed the digital economy, innovation and services, it is timely for European decision-makers to reflect on what digital learning can really do to modernise our education and training systems, unveiling its expected impact in terms of both growth and social cohesion. EUCIS-LLL thus supports the plea made by the European Commission for an integrated and collective approach to the digital agenda seen both as a challenge and a great opportunity especially to support a cultural shift in the way we teach and learn in Europe.

More:

• EUCIS-LLL policy paper on Opening Up Education
• EAEA position on Opening Up Education

• EUCIS-LLL database of good practices
• European Commission communication “Opening Up Education“, 25 October 2013
• Open Education Europa: an EU portal to provide a single gateway to European OER

Source: EUCIS-LLL website

Social Networks: We Are Running Out of Excuses!

We are the first generation of parents and educators learning to live with social networks – the first!

It is surprising that there should appear in the world of education, where everything would seem to have been invented over 2,500 years, new resources driving us to such a thorough recycling effort. Yet it happens.

It would be hard to imagine Aristotle’s work if he had been able to connect to Facebook and enter into a dialogue with, say, a Persian philosopher, and chat on Twitter with Alexander the Great, while exchanging whatsapp messages with some erudite Egyptian priest from Ptolemy’s court. The change that these new forms of communication bring to our lives is so great that we need to stop, take a deep breath and, after a while, think what we mean to do, where we want to go, and what our attitude ought to be in the face of the overwhelming response that our children have given to those new forms.