How Does The School Curriculum Help?

The school curriculum requires the students to be educated on the strategies of cyber safety as well as the ethical and social issues associated with being a digital citizen.

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What is required by teachers?

Teachers are required to:

Demonstrate an understanding of the relevant issues and the strategies available to support the safe, responsible and ethical use of ICT in learning and teaching.

Demonstrate understanding of safe, legal, and ethical use of digital resources and tools, including cyber safety practices, respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources.[1]

What does this mean?

Students will be provided with situations where they can discuss and utilise different strategies to handle safety issues with technology, such as the opening of unknown emails and webpages. This topic itself is incredibly important, and will remain as a topic of discussion throughout all aspects of the curriculum.

e.g. If a student is researching for a poster on the Olympics, and an unreliable looking webpage attempts to redirect them to another location, the skills students have gathered in their ICT topics will help them handle the situation appropriately.

Students will also learn about the usage of digital resources and tools, teaching them the importance of copyright, referencing of resources. In addition to the basics, students will investigate cyber safety practices through understanding intellectual property, and the understanding that their unique works are automatically copyrighted.

 Just how important is it?

Incredibly!

The usage of digital resources and technology are in no way limited to a student’s life in school - It is something they will require for their entire life. The earlier a student learns the details and limitations surrounding the usage in technology, the earlier they can apply their understanding into different curriculum topics through research and appropriate documentation of their findings.

[1] Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (2012) ‘National Professional Standards for Teachers – ICT Elaborations’ Accessed 06/09/2012
< http://acce.edu.au/sites/acce.edu.au/files/TTF%20-%20Graduate%20Teacher%20Standards%20-% 20ICT%20 Elaborations%20-%20200411.pdf>