E-safety and digital skills as part of school curriculum

Abstract

In order to respond to the needs for empowering students, teachers and parents in the area of e-safety, electronic violence prevention and digital skills, five primary schools in Croatia carried out the project called “Children’s safety on the Internet”. In this paper we discuss the content and evaluation of school curriculum “Children’s safety on the Internet” developed in that project and the findings emerged from the curriculum piloting in early grades, 1 – 4, with students aged 7 to 10, their parents and teachers. The results show that the curriculum and learning resources met students’ expectations and that the team of authors successfully implemented modern teaching strategies in the curriculum and resources (textbooks, guides, interactive multimedia, e-books) creation although some of the results showed that certain lessons need clarification to fulfil the expected learning outcome. The results of the piloting were immediately used for improving the quality of the curriculum and after that all learning and teaching resources were published online for free. Learning resources have found their place in the proposal for the new national curriculum for the cross-curricular subject called Use of ICT as well as in the curriculum for the school subject of Informatics in all primary and secondary schools in Croatia.