At the very start of the new school year, we reserved an entire morning of school time to help our new students in Years 5 and 6 become fit in using the recently introduced school laptops and Microsoft Teams software. What had been a necessity for distance learning in the previous school year has now developed into a further area of learning with a wide array of uses.

We are pleased to see that media is becoming a natural part of daily school life and to be able to show the children how to deal with media resources properly. To this end nearly all our classrooms have already been equipped with modern media desks and the remainder will be finished in the coming weeks. During a short digital rallye at the beginning of our “Media Day” the children visited various stations of the digital jungle: writing emails, finding fellow students on the school’s network, and sending off the first chats with Microsoft Teams all worked fine. However, making use of these techniques correctly is only a fraction of what we need to know when navigating the digital world. What remains central is also the most important thing in real-life: respectful interaction with one another as well as knowledge and acknowledgement of the rules.

To deal with this topic we called in an expert from the Friedrichshafen Police Department, who impressively described his daily work as a specialist for media abuse prevention and laid out potential pitfalls for young users. His topics included: What dangers lurk on the internet? How can I create a secure password? What can I post on social networks and what shouldn’t be posted? Afterwards we had time for a joint video conference and that, too, worked perfectly.

Nina Peters, Teacher