Volunteers of the CHILDREN.WITHUS have been teaching for over year. In various social and educational establishments they have been telling how to use Internet smartly and safely. This year they have visited hospitals, orphanages and schools and even organized classes for elderly people in social centers.
The main goal of the project is to inform children and adults about useful opportunities offered by the Internet for education, communication and leisure as well as its potential dangers and defense mechanisms. The project lives and develops taking up various forms and formats. This is not only due to the specificity of the goal, but also difference between settings where classes take place and the questions difference participants come up with.
For example, children, who are in a long-term therapy at the Federal clinical centre with cancer require a bit less knowledge and a little more attention and warmth that can be shared by volunteers. That is why seminars at this and other similar places are usually aimed at improving children’s mood and help fight their disease. On the contrary, in Children’s drug abuse clinic №6 volunteers organize classes that are aimed at helping children with fighting drug addiction and further successful socialization. That is why the main topics of the seminars are cyber ethics and other concepts that are vital for successful socialization within the information society.
Places where the classes organized by volunteers are particularly popular are regional centers of social service. The visitors of these centers are usually children from the families which require particular help from the government. These are children from very large families, for instance. Groups are usually very diverse in such centers, which brings in certain difficulties during the classes. Children usually attend the seminars at the social centers voluntarily after their classes at schools.
When developing training programs at social centers volunteers face a particularly difficult challenge: on the one hand, their seminars build on the knowledge children receive at their IT class at school and have offer some fresh material, but on the other hand it has to be interested for children. Volunteers managed to develop a series of interlinked classes which satisfy the given conditions.
During the first class called «What is Internet» volunteers tell children not only about the history of World Wide Web, but also tell about creation of all different protocols or services. Due to fact that modern children already actively use Internet these seminars take the form of interactive conversation.
Sometimes volunteers organize quizzes and give prizes for correct answers. Winning a prize is exciting for any child. However, it turns out that despite the fact that they use computers throughout their life, some of the questions remain quite difficult to answer and in the end children do learn something new.
The second class is usually dedicated to Internet security. There is also a lot of interaction with children throughout this class. During the seminar it often turns out that children know about such dangers as phishing and online fraud because they became the victims.
The third seminar generally depends on specific needs of this particular group of children.
Author: Fedor Yarmosh
Source: “Razumniy Internet” Foundation
