New teachers' website delivers a strong lesson in e-safety The launch of the TeachToday.eu website fills a major gap in the web awareness puzzle. Many teachers may feel the need to address the e-safety issues in class but fear that they know less about the new technologies than their pupils; others consider that such issues should indeed be addressed in school but don’t know how to tackle a topic that is outside the official curriculum and therefore unsupported.

The TeachToday site has been created to help teachers guide their pupils to use technology responsibly and safely. The website places children at the heart of technology and builds around several key themes that teachers underline as being the major issues of concern today: cyberbullying, searching the internet, well-being and health and privacy and personal safety. Here users will find facts and figures, resources, links and much more.
 
TeachToday is designed to promote a whole school approach to managing technology and behaviour in schools. It provides users with best practice resources developed by leading experts across Europe. These are complemented by out-of the-box lesson plans ready for immediate implementation in either primary or secondary school classes.
 
The website responds to a frequently voiced request of the educational communities – it is developed for them, by them, in interaction with pedagogical and safety experts and leading actors from industry. It integrates pragmatic information straight from industry, and builds on teachers’ day to day experience, maps their needs to the national curriculum and takes account of the ever-changing issues they face in their daily practice. A comprehensive jargon buster demystifies technical terms, offers links to more detailed background information and describes major entities from the technology world. A variety of bookmarking tools allow optimal personalisation of the website.

Fourteen leading actors from industry, from mobile operators and social networking companies to internet and mobile content providers, worked closely with European Schoolnet (EUN) to create the materials and ensure that teachers were consulted throughout the development of the site. Together they will develop the site to keep apace with technology and the issues it raises. A multi-strand forum offers school staff unique opportunities to interact with peers, safety experts and industry across Europe, to exchange information and practice and find just-in-time responses to their queries. An integrated opinion poll constantly gauges top safety priorities for school communities to ensure that the site meets evolving needs.

EUN is an international partnership of 28 European Ministries of Education developing learning for schools, teachers and pupils across Europe. It also coordinates the INSAFE network.

Participating companies are AOL, BEBO, Buongiorno, Deutsche Telekom /T-Mobile, Facebook, Google, GSMA Europe, Microsoft, MySpace, Orange, 02/Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Vodafone and Yahoo! Europe.