EDUCAINTERNET: A PLATFORM TO TEACH AND LEARN SAFE AND RESPONSIBLE USE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

Life nowadays cannot be understood without social networks, mobile and web applications, video games as well as other digital technologies. Young people are the ones that use these technologies more but they are usually alone in the virtual world. They need to face challenges and risks that these technologies introduce and they need to take control of the situation and conscientiously act with great care.

Some examples of these situations can be the difficulty of understanding one's digital identity and how to manage it and how it can affect now or in the future, or digital property and its implications, or how to identify dangerous communities.

This paper presents an e-Learning platform called EducaInternet that is available at http://educainternet.org. It is a social collaborative site for teachers and students to create educational resources about safe and responsible use of digital technologies. This platform now contains eleven generic topics or subjects that have been identified as challenges or potential risks and that both teachers and students should know about. These topics are: Information management, Access to inappropriate content, Privacy Management and digital identity, Netiquette, Grooming, Cyberbullying, Sexting, Identity theft, Technoaddictions, Online dangerous communities, Virus and fraud protection. The platform is open to add more topics in the future as the community grows and demand them or as they appear.

EducaInternet offers the possibility to the users to upload resources, create enriched presentations with the resources uploaded by any user or resources from the Internet or even create full courses with the resources and presentations. And as it is a social network it allows users to connect with experts in each field, teachers and learners, to see their contributions and collaborate in the production of new contents.

EducaInternet has been built upon a framework for building e-Learning platforms called ViSH. Both EducaInternet and ViSH as well as all the integrated tools are open source.

Finally this paper also presents some statistics and quality evaluations. EducaInternet has been in production for three months and has 180 users, 240 enriched presentations and more than 1700 resources. More than 50 presentations were evaluated by experts following the LORI (Learning Object Review Instrument) standard and the results are also presented and discussed.