Training Sources

CyberTraining

João Amado, Armanda Matos, Teresa Pessoa, Thomas Jäger, Øystein Samnøen, Juan Calmaestra, Rosario del Rey, Rosario Ortega, Joaquín A. Mora-Merchán, Helen Cowie, Pat Colliety, Mona O’Moore, Conor Mc Guckin, Niall Crowley, Carmen Viejo & Antonio Maldonado.

Taking action against cyberbullying

2008

English

Portuguese, Spanish, English

European

Online Publication

School bullying

Headmasters, Teachers

This manual is the result of the Cyberbullying in Europe Project and it pretends to be a useful resource for trainers of teachers. The common objective is to include in the programs of formation the application, by the participants, of all that they know about bullying, cyberbullying and successful intervention mechanisms when facing them.
To carry out the manual, information at different levels has been compiled; information whose purpose is to evaluate the trainers, their necessities and preferences related to a formation manual. This process included a online questionnaire for 55 trainers in all Europe, a qualitative analysis of the results and a summary of all the answers in the way of a provisional report, going in depth in some of the results with an online forum moderated by 16 trainers, which was carried out in Moodle, a virtual learning environment (VLE). The general results and conclusion both of the online questions and of the online debate group were compiled in a report.
This manual counts on several modules, carried out by several professionals.
1. Introduction to training: principles and strategies
2. Introduction to TIC and safety on the Internet
3. Introduction to Cyberbullying
4. Fighting against online harassment
5. Working with parents
6. Working with schools
7. Working with children and teenagers
The central idea of the manual is to highlight some of the principles that can provide a global frame to plan and develop training activities in all Europe, as well as providing guidelines for the appropriate and adequate use of strategies and pedagogical resources within the context of effective training activities and based on science. On the other hand, it pretends to achieve that trainers understand the differences in the learning process of the different target groups and, in the end, to offer guidelines to help trainers to improve their interpersonal communication skills towards formation, among others.

The evaluated material is a guide composed by independent chapters that can be accessed from the home page. The structure is logical and ordered and the content of the material is very useful and varied.

Its structure allows trainers to choose between the elements they may need for each occasion without having to revise or download the whole book. In fact, the material is presented as a data bank of resources that allows potential users to find what they need to confront the complex phenomenon of cyberbullying.

The fact that each module comes with an initial summary and a description of the objectives and of expected results is of great utility to have a good first idea of the approaches of the different modules, facilitating this way the election to find the resources and activities that the trainer may need for each moment for his purposes.

Each module starts with a small theoretical revision that describes, in a summarized way, what is known thanks to investigation about cyberbullying, TIC or traditional bullying.

The second part of the module is oriented towards practical aspects, including activities that have as their objective going in depth into the contents exposed in the first part of the module through exploration, reflection and discussion. Most of the activities are based in resources such as narrations, videos or other online resources.

One of the strong points of the manual is its wide availability, as the manual can be found as ebook and as PDF files. Using the ebook, one can directly access to a large amount of online resources such as videos, reports, useful websites and other external resources which are pointed to via links located in each module. This way, with an available Internet connection, the resources, such as videos, that are included in the manual, could be viewed directly.

Furthermore, there have been included several links to external resources that help to go in depth and illustrate the contents that are being worked on.

Therefore, the diffusion of the material is excellent, since, besides being available for free on the Internet, it is available in five languages: English, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Bulgarian. Moreover, each version for each language includes material for its own country.

Taking into account all of the above, we can confirm the relation that exists between the CyberTraining Manual and the European Project School Safety Net, as they look for successful strategies of intervention to achieve a complete intervention of professionals when facing different cases of cyberbullying, a type of bullying that is a risk factor for early school leaving.