Category: cyber primary curriculum

April 19, 2021

Cyber in Numeracy and Mathematics

Mind Your Money

When so much spending is done online, or digitally even when in-store, surely it makes sense that we explore how cyber resilience can help us look after our finances? The UK Strategy for Financial Wellbeing aims for more ‘children and young people getting a meaningful financial education’ and we believe that cyber resilience forms a significant part of this.

This presentation explores the links between financial education and cyber resilience and ideas, such as:

explore how to make better spending decisions
understand how advertisers and influencers encourage us to spend our money
learn effective strategies to keep our money as safe and secure as possible

By taking the time to understand how children and young people spend their time and money online, while reflecting on their own online habits, practitioners can make learning more reflective and representative of what their learners experience. By linking these curricular areas, the learning becomes more engaging, relevant and realistic.

view full Wakelet

Cryptography

Cryptography is the study of constructing and analysing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages. Encryption is used to secure our digital devices and services – whether that’s passwords, emails or social media – it takes information or data and disguises (encrypts) it, so that only the person who is supposed to access it can (be decrypting).

This wakelet contains links to cryptography resources that may be engaging for learners in numeracy and mathematics, computing science or social studies contexts – for example, Alan Turing and the mathematicians at Bletchley Park who decrypted hidden messages during WWII.

There are lots of other examples of encryption and cyphers throughout history – do you know of any?

February 4, 2021

Information Literacy – critical thinking online

About information literacy

“The ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use. It empowers us as citizens to reach and express informed views and to engage fully with society.” – CILIP Information Literacy Group

back to Consume

Planning information literacy learning

Almost three-quarters of young people say social media is an important source of news to them – although there is growing awareness of its trustworthiness only around a third of young people will question what they read. (Ofcom, 2019)

As this content is dependent on being read, viewed or heard online it makes sense to bundle digital literacy and literacy and English experiences and outcomes, such as:

- Searching, processing and managing information responsibly, TCH x-02a
- Cyber resilience and internet safety, TCH x-03a
- Recognise the difference between fact and opinion and progressing to evaluative comments about relevance reliability and credibility with appropriate justification, LIT x-18a

This learning is often taught in the context of ‘fake news’ but ‘false or misleading information’ is a more accurate term. False or misleading information can be potentially dangerous when it relates to medical or health claims and requires learners to be smarter about how they engage with online content.

Consume. Create. Communicate.

Educators should help children and young people understand how to engage critically with content the consume, create and communicate.

Learners should understand the risks of deliberate misinformation and know how to identify content that is misleading. They should be aware of how to manage their feeds to reduce the chances of seeing misinformation or harmful content and be able to use the platform’s reporting tools to report this type of content.

More challenging is supporting learners to consider the impact of content they share and the part they play when they share malicious misinformation. Discussions, linked in to PSHE can be an effective way to explore the harms of spreading misinformation.

These resources can be used to explore the features of ‘fake news’ and deliberate misinformation and how to identify and avoid it: GCF Global resources

There are a number of credible and reliable websites offering fact checks:
Reality Check – BBC News
FactCheck – Channel 4 News
Reuters Fact Check
Fact Check: Political & News Fact Check | AP News
Fact Check Tools (google.com)

For teachers using Microsoft Teams, the Search Coach tool is useful to evaluate search results; each result in a search has a ‘reliability score’ that informs learners of the validity of the source: Microsoft Search Coach

Who can help?

Internet Matters has an in-depth guide on misinformation here: Internet Matters

Information literacy is also a key role of school librarians and they are always willing to support learning about it. Find out more about how school librarians can support information literacy learning.

The literacy and English curricular team at Education Scotland have more on their national Professional Learning Community site:

Vibrant Libraries, Thriving Schools national strategy

Information, Digital Literacy & Digital Creativity

Resources for educators

Digital Media Literacy by GCF Global

This site has lots of free lessons and resources, including this series of lessons on how to interpret and evaluate information online. The lessons are progressive, relevant and each one comes with activities that are easy to adapt for your learners’ needs.

YouTube Playlist

Digiduck

The Detective Digiduck story and resources from Childnet, and author Lindsay Buck, are a great introduction to CRIS and information literacy. In this story Digiduck finds that not everything on the internet can be trusted and that you need to check the reliability of it from a range of sources.

Fact or fake – BBC Bitesize

This site has lots of information, videos and activities to support you develop your learners’ understanding of what fake news is and how it affects us.

National Literacy Trust

The NLT has a fake news and critical literacy resources page with cross-curricular resources for learners of all ages.

They also have their Words for Life page that explains what fake news is, how to spot it and links to The Guardian NewsWise content and has a section on child-friendly news sites: Child-friendly news | NewsWise | The Guardian

YouTube | Moving Image Education

Moving Image Education has lots of resources and information to support you teach film literacy, including this activity that supports learners evaluate and analyse YouTube content. Let the learners lead the learning by selecting their own video and then analysing it with this scaffolded activity.

Making Sense of Media

Ofcom hosts this site which contains information about media literacy – what it is and how to teach it – alongside reports that explain how, what and why children and young people are accessing media. Read the latest research on the impact of covid on children’s media lives here.

February 2, 2021

Cyber in Health and Wellbeing

This page is designed to help teachers plan learning that covers aspects of cyber resilience and internet safety and health and wellbeing (HWB).

go to cyber home

Why cyber resilience and internet safety?

The Internet safety for children and young people: national action plan, from the Scottish Government, states the aim of: “[…] children and young people to be protected, safe and supported in the online world and for them to be able to enjoy the internet, show resilience and take advantage of the opportunities it has to offer.”

The plan has three broad aims but the first two certainly fall into the remit of educators:

Giving everybody the skills, knowledge and understanding to help children and young people stay safe online: we will help parents, carers and people who work with children and families to understand how to help children stay safe online and how to deal with problems if they occur.

Inspiring safe and responsible use and behaviour: we will make it clear that individuals, including children and young people themselves, need to take responsibility for their own online behaviour.

Internet safety for children and young people: national action plan

Education Scotland’s HWB guidance defines a resilient child as one who can:

“resist adversity, cope with uncertainty and recover more successfully from traumatic events or episodes.”

health and wellbeing experiences and outcomes

Mental, emotional, social and physical wellbeing

The Cyber Toolkit for Teachers can support teachers to understand how children and young people use the internet and the potential risks of doing so. This focuses on how devices and accounts are used to consume, create and communicate.

Social wellbeing may focus on aspects of citizenship and values: how they participate and interact with others online – are they respectful to others?

Mental and emotional wellbeing may focus on aspects of interactions with others and how the behaviour of others may affect them – how do they manage these interactions and develop resilience to overcome them?

Any learner who potentially experiences harm in these areas should contact Childline.

go to Cyber Toolkit

There are aspects of the 5 RIghts Digital Childhood report (2017) that may be useful to consider, particularly the age-group developmental milestones. These provide a useful reference to what behaviour and potential risks might be expected at each age and stage.

Read the report

‘Screen time’ is often spoken about in terms of children and young people’s health and wellbeing but the OECD (p42, 2019) states that such studies have ‘weak findings, are correlational and an unwarranted moral panic.’ Therefore, teachers may avoid teaching the harms of ‘too much screen time’ and focus on other aspects of cyber resilience.

read the OECD report: Emotional Well-being in the Digital Age

Relationships, sexual health and parenthood

Children and young people should learn about relationships that are healthy, respectful, and based on trust and respect. However, there may also be a need to support them when this is not the case.

The NSPCC defines Technology-Assisted Harmful Sexual Behaviour (TAHSB) as: “a range of behaviour including the developmentally inappropriate use of pornography, online sexual abuse, grooming, sexting.”

Education Scotland have collaborated with Stop It Now to create guidance and support for teachers on Technology-Assisted Harmful Sexual Behaviour (TAHSB). The TAHSB programme is free and can be delivered in any local authority.

click the image to enlarge it

The Hackett continuum is used across Scotland, by the NSPCC, Education Scotland and the Scottish Government, to evaluate the sexual behaviours of children and young people.