Intellectual outputs
O1: Instalab: workshop on online privacy
Instalab is an Instagram-like workshop on online privacy. Its main novelty is that it goes beyond the standard set of interactive lessons and multiple-choice questions about best practices in the use of social networks: Instalab offers a social engineering wargame in a fake social network that works like a sandbox.
Social engineering – in the context of computer security – is a set of techniques designed to manipulate people into performing actions or disclosing confidential information. Hackers and crackers take advantage of social engineering techniques to gain access to technologically well-protected systems (e.g, firewalls or other perimeter security solutions). At a less technical level, social engineering can be used by strangers or stalkers to gain access to private information of a victim. A wargame – in this context – is a security challenge in which players must use their skills to exploit vulnerabilities in a system to gain access to it. Wargames often provide fake servers to be attacked in a set of levels of increasing difficulty to facilitate the learning process about defense against hacking (e.g., Hackerslab).
Similarly, Instalab provides a social engineering wargame automated fake social profile (also known as “social bots” in Instalab) interact with players. All the information of the profiles related to these social bots is fictitious, so that no privacy of any real person is violated when playing InstaLab. Along the set of Instalab challenges, players will have to refine their social engineering techniques to solve them. Thus, as it happens in training courses on ethical hacking, after playing with this privacy-related wargame, it may be easier for these players to identify situations where malicious others pretend to use the same techniques on them in real social networking apps.
O2: SAILS Safe resource for parents
When parents face the fact that their children need professional help in their development, they are often confused: where to start, which therapy to choose, how long to do each of them. Due to their lack of information and despair to do as much as possible within the shortest possible time, they may choose therapies that are counterproductive to each other, as therapists do not communicate with each other. They are looking for answers online, not necessarily finding the most appropriate solutions and therapies. Ideally, there would be a group of experts consisting of movement therapists, speech therapists, psychologists, etc, who see the child as a “case” and would evaluate the condition and suggest the next therapy needed. We plan to put together a methodological handbook/guide/toolkit to establish such case- management centers, that would enable that helpers and any key figures in the life of the child to start to work as a team and to communicate with each other, evaluate the current condition of the child and suggest the next step. This would release the parent from the responsibility of deciding about the therapies without having the necessary knowledge. The target group of this are the therapists and the parents. The output is published in a downloadable and printable electronic format.
Donwload SAILING MASTERS’ GUIDE
To navigate the digital world with your Child
SAILS Parents Resource
Available in English, Dutch and Hungarian.
O3: SAILS guide for teachers
Navigating in the “new normal” has never been more demanding for teachers. Despite the fact that ICT and online tools have been used in education for some time now, with a number of teachers happily taking up the role of content designers (Sotiriou et al 2016), the Covid19 pandemic, with its sudden introduction of distant teaching and learning at large-scale, has exposed gaps in skills relating to issues, such as national and EU regulations on minors and the internet, minors and screen time in the context of school education, student online engagement and participation, student digital behaviour, etc. Taking into consideration that national lockdowns and increased reliance on the internet during this time, it becomes imperative that teachers are up-to-date and confident when it comes to student online safety given certain evidence that overall malign online behaviour has actually increased in the past year. Between March 9-31, as COVID-19 began to reshape the way people live, the Office of the eSafety Commissioner in Australia revealed a 40% spike in reports of ‘harmful and illegal content’, cyberbullying and image-based abuse (The Educator, 2020). This Output will produce a concise and easily digestible guide for teachers on online safety and sound and innovative uses of ICT in the context of the pandemic with a complete set of supporting activities for students, an implementation guide and an evaluation kit. The Output is innovative in the sense that it wishes to bring together various ideas and strategies on the issue of online safety in education that have become dominant in the context of COVID19. There is an apparent difficulty in the teaching community to easily digest legal documents and centrally designed guidelines that relate to the safety of online tools and the internet in general and an ever bigger difficulty in meaningfully implementing them in the classroom, beyond a plain repetition of rules. The pandemic has exposed further such apparent difficulties. The approach will put an emphasis on teacher empowerment, supporting the development of confident practitioners (rather than colleagues who rely heavily on the ICT teacher and those responsible for GDPR). Aside from the fundamental issue of online safety and the prevention of misuses, this intellectual output will offer examples of smart practices as part of the various activities and guides. This guide includes also some instructions and recommendations to use Instalab tool in the classroom (IO1).
Download SAILS GUIDE FOR TEACHERS
Safe & Autonomous Internet-based Learning
Available in English and Dutch.
O4: SAILS Safe resource for school leaders
Recent market survey of the European School Heads Association (www.esha.org) shows that schools use different strategies and have different approaches to digital education. COVID-19 school closures made it necessary for parents, teachers and school leaders to learn to navigate digital realities together. While experiences made the parties involved appreciate the potential and benefits of using digital technologies for learning, there are several areas in which school leaders need support. According to well known innovation models (Kable 2009), there is a correlation between the long term effect of innovations and the presence of a school wide strategy plan. Given that recent innovations were born out of a necessity (schools were closed) the chances are that without the presence of a school wide strategic plan, digital education will not have a lasting contribution to the pedagogic approach. The SAIL Safe resource for school leaders will use an innovative risk mitigation approach to enable school leaders to implement digital education and safeguard learners from undesired effects of social media platforms that empower them for school leadership in the digital age. We will implement a whole school planning model that enables school leaders to carefully plan the lasting implementation of digital education taking into account the long term school strategy, resistance to change, necessary resources and training needs for school leaders and teachers. The innovation of the model stands in the fact that it tackles at the same time all the needed areas where change is needed and all the processes that must be affected by change. This differentiates SAILS from many existing approaches, which focus on a single dimension of school without being able to safeguard children from the negative side effects of their online presence in general and social media platforms in particular. It will support school leaders in understanding how the innovation model for digital education works, understanding the rights of their children and safeguarding learners from threats of working online in general and social media platforms in particular. The SAIL Safe resource for school leaders is a guide available online for policy makers and school leaders. The guide will provide school leaders and policy makers with background information on the following areas:
- innovation models for education
- social media platform
- research evidence related to online threats
- legislation around digital childhood including learning online
The expected impact on school leaders using the resource is that they will become empowered to implement digital education effectively and safeguard the learners from the potential negative side effects from digital online presence, The resource is based upon country-specific experiences from Spain, Greece, the Netherlands and Hungary but will be transferable to other country context.
Download CAPTAIN’S HANDBOOK
SAILS Safe Resource for School Leaders
Available in English, Dutch and Hungarian.