Seminar for Slovenian teachers on safe internet use in times of COVID-19

Schools in Slovenia have been closed since Monday, 16 March 2020 due to coronavirus crisis. Since then, teachers have had to start teaching from home, online, literally overnight. As there were no national guidelines, schools and teachers faced difficult challenges – how to organise their lessons to be productive, useful and in accordance with the law. Slovenian Awareness Centre Safe.si started receiving questions from teachers and other school professionals on safe teleworking. To answer this increasing demand, on Thursday, 16 April 2020, the Slovenian Safer Internet Centre (SIC) held a webinar on the topic of safe internet use, focusing on teleworking in education, attracting over 580 participants.

Date 2020-05-11 Author Slovenian Safer Internet Centre Section awareness

To make the webinar tailored to the needs of participants, the Slovenian SIC gave them the opportunity to submit questions when registering, thereby receiving more than 60 questions. Most of them were related to the use of tools for video conferences and telework, as teachers were very concerned about the use of tools such as Zoom, Skype, and so on, as well as different social networks for school work. Many of the questions were related to meeting the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the protection of privacy and data, the possibility of unwanted recordings of live video lectures by students or their parents, and how to handle and store videos sent by students.

The webinar was prepared by external colleagues of the Awareness Centre Safe.si Benjamin Lesjak, PhD, who presented the legal aspects, and Tjaša Jerman Kuželički, who presented the general aspects of safe internet use in education and home schooling. Benjamin Lesjak is an expert in legal solutions for the information society, the author of a handbook for schools on online security, a lecturer and workshop provider for Safe.si. Tjaša Jerman Kuželički is also a Safe.si lecturer and workshop provider, specialising in educational, relational and social aspects of internet use.

Both speakers prepared the webinar by combining topics related to teleworking with topics related to the safe use of the internet, thus covering:

  • the importance of protecting the personal data of students and teachers;
  • the possible risks of using video conferences for teaching;
  • the risks of recording and posting videos;
  • the possibility of using social networks in schoolwork and possible risks;
  • the importance of security and privacy settings on social networks;
  • the particularities and rules of online communication;
  • the reliability of information on the web;
  • the reliability of the internet as a source of information for learning;
  • and online scams and abuses.

Screenshot of the Slovenian SIC webinar for teachers Screenshot of the Slovenian SIC webinar for teachers

The information and knowledge the participants gained through the webinar will come useful, both for the current situation where they have to work and educate from home and for the future, when teaching process will return back to the classrooms.

The ARNES (Academic and Research Network of Slovenia) video platform was used for the webinar. It enables livestreaming to a large number of viewers without logging in or breaching the privacy of users. Over 580 teachers and other school staff watched the webinar live. On the next day, a video recording of the webinar has been made available on the Awareness Centre's website. In the first week after its publication, another 1,500 people watched the webinar. The evaluation among the participants showed that they were very satisfied with the event. 98 per cent of them said they were satisfied or very satisfied with the webinar and 97 per cent said that they would like to have more similar webinars.

Find out more information about the work of the Slovenian Safer Internet Centre (SIC) generally, including its awareness raising, helpline, hotline and youth participation services, or find similar information for Safer Internet Centres throughout Europe.

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