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.

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.