Ethical Aspects of Digital Learning at Schools

This project arose from the expanding digitalised learning development of our European schools. The more students learn digitally, the more conspicuous is the necessity of ensuring a clear ethical guideline (compliance) communicated by students and teachers for the use of digital means at school so as to initiate a reflexive consciousness and behavior of digital media, especially convergent media as smartphones, for everyday life of the students, too. Thus, the objective of our project is to promote the awareness of ethical aspects of digital learning and use of digital media by developing and implementing it in the media curriculum at our schools based on European humanistic and religious values. Being interdisciplinary this project aims at objectives relevant to IThics in various subjects (IT, ethics, religion, music, fine arts, sciences, environmental issues, economy and social studies). Firstly, our participating schools are committed to do surveys on existing good practices to share and to establish a pool of IThics workshops as a base for our project. In the same period the staff will get social, psychological and pedagogical information on the very important part of digital media and communication in the students‘ everyday life as their singular instrument to construct, present and test drafts of their individuality to their peers, e.g. in social networks. This will enable teachers to understand and emphasize the actual digital behavior of their students and youth cultures in a deepened way.Secondly, an optimising process shall take place in class and in workshops at the participating schools and transnational meetings focusing on various ethical aspects. Experts of media ethics will be also invited from external institutes for lectures at our conferences to train all participants. But the expertise of the students as peers will be used extensively, too. As a result of this curriculum development, the didactical and methodological output shall be disseminated at conferences and during transregional training workshops to share results in practice and on our project platform to transform it in reliable outcome. Thirdly, the last phase will be implementation of this enriched media curriculum simultaneously and obligatorily at our schools in different European countries. This implementation will be finally evaluated after a certain time of practice to get information about effect, impact and sustainability of the projects results in school and everyday life of all participants with a special focus on the students and at a broad European scale.