Better Internet for Kids

Swipe & Respect is an educational toolbox on online respect, boundaries, and gender stereotypes for professionals working with young people. The tool helps young people think critically about online behaviour, gender roles, and online gender-related violence such as hate speech, doxing, or the dissemination of private images. 

Through interactive case studies, dilemmas, and group assignments, themes such as power dynamics, digital safety, and empathy are made discussable in an accessible way.

The Austrian awareness center Saferinternet.at inquires each year: Which social networks do young people in Austria use? Which platforms are trending, which get less important? The results are published with the Youth Internet Monitor (www.jugendinternetmonitor.at). The survey was conducted in December 2023. 400 young people between 11 and 17 years old were asked. The survey was published in March 2024 and is representative of the younger generation of Austria.

This constantly growing collection of teaching examples provides teachers with suggestions on how they can work on various digital topics with their students. Teaching examples on the topics of AI and internet fraud are currently available. These provide teachers with input on how they can actively use new tools such as ChatGPT and discuss them with their students and how they can sensitise young people to internet fraud, phishing, malware and fake shops.

The scavenger hunts allow young people between the ages of 10 and 14 to expand their knowledge of various online topics in a fun way. The players receive short riddles from a chatbot and research the answers themselves on Saferinternet.at. Only when a question is answered correctly do they move on to the next one. For each correct answer there are one or more solution letters. These are collected and finally result in a solution sentence. The sentence is required to successfully complete the scavenger hunt.

Through the use of image editing software and automatic filters, children and young people are confronted with unrealistic body images on social networks. Influencers, whose job it is to look as good as possible because it earns them money, sometimes also distort young people's perceptions with their content. An unreflected approach to this content can lead to their own body image being influenced. The brochure explains the phenomena associated with unrealistic beauty ideals on the internet and provides practical tips on how to reduce the pressure they exert.

The Unboxing Tech Toolkit helps students to better understand their smartphone, its design and their own usage behaviour. It teaches them how smartphones and apps work and which mechanisms encourage them to use the applications for longer. It offers a compact summary on the topic of dark patterns, persuasive design, etc., whereby individual pages can also be picked out and used for teaching purposes.
The toolkit was developed by the Pranava Institute in collaboration with Tactical Tech and translated and adapted for German-speaking countries by Saferinternet.at.

The cyberbullying scavenger is a free online puzzle game for 10 to 14-year-olds. The game involves solving tricky puzzle questions on the topic of cyberbullying. It deals with questions such as: What is cyberbullying? What can I do if I am affected myself? How do I react to hate comments on the Internet?

During the course of primary school, the independent and competent use of digital devices such as a mobile phone becomes increasingly important. There are countless opportunities to integrate current Safer Internet topics into lessons - be it in the form of a computer station during free work, a discussion on a current topic or the design of a poster. Every activity, every discussion, every project carried out by teachers is important and useful.

Apart from the search engine itself, Google includes many other services and platforms such as the video portal YouTube, the navigation service Google Maps, the app store Google Play, the email service Gmail, the browser Chrome, the photo service Picasa, the online data storage service Drive and many more. To make it easier to manage Google services, there is a central platform, namely the Google Account. Users can make cross-platform privacy and security settings in the Google Account.

YouTube is a free video portal for watching, sharing and uploading videos. In this practical step-by-step privacy guideline we show you the most important settings for safe use.