foolfillment: the blog

The Herald reports today on a new course offered at Intermediate 1 in a few schools in a small trial. It aims to make pupils aware of the dangers of the internet. I don’t know details of the course content but the report mentions the usual suspects of chat rooms and internet grooming; spyware and viruses.

It’s an important issue and this course is probably a good way of making people more aware. My concern though is that in schools this sort of thing should be taught alongside any subject that uses the internet (ie. all of them) not as a separate course but as an important integrated part.

In the main I suspect teachers will teach internet safety in the same way a CDT teacher stops pupils losing limbs on certain machines - they only let pupils use certain sites. Whereas pupils should be given the knowledge to go off and discover sites then make informed decisions about whether it is safe or not.

It’s also important that this course stays relevant too, it’s no use if it sets itself up to say bebo is bad (it isn’t any way, if anything it’s just a bit rubbish) when in a year this could be wrong or irrelevant, and in five years totally obsolete.

teaching, internet, safety, SQA

This entry was posted at 3:11 pm on the 24th of July, 2006 and is filed under scotland, teach, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.