SONET-BULL "Using social networking ICT tools with peer learning and crowdsourcing techniques to train school communities on how to deal with student bullying"
Funding Programme
European Comission - Erasmus Plus, Key Action 2 “Strategic Partnership” School Education
Duration
2 years (September 2014 - August 2016)
Partnership:
The consortium of the project consists of 5 partners from 4 EU countries (Greece, Belgium, Italy, and Ireland).
1. Hellenic Open University (HOU) Greece (Coordinator)
2. INFOREF, Belgium
3. Computer Technology Institute & Press Diophantus (CTI), Greece
4. Fondazione Mondo Digitale (FMD), Italy
5. Dublin Centre University (DCU), Anty Bullying Centre (ABC), Ireland
Abstract
School bullying is a type of bullying that occurs in an educational setting and it is defined in Wikipedia as “as an unwelcome behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance”. School bullying has become an epidemic in our society and this fact has emerged a variety of studies across Europe and worldwide aiming at investigating this rapidly spreading problem. To deal with bullying and to ensure a safe, based on equality and free of concern learning environment, the orchestrated contribution of all stakeholders of school education is necessary.
In the SONET-BULL project, we propose to combine modern pedagogical approaches (eLearning and peer learning) with widely used technological means (Internet, social networking, mobiles) in order to provide timely and continuous support to the entire community of stakeholders in dealing with school bullying.
The project main objective is to design, create, implement and evaluate a training platform that will provide teachers, teacher trainers, and all other stakeholders access to accredited training material on school bullying, as well as the means to publish their experiences and to comment and tag the experience of their peers. The main aim is the creation of a training platform that will provide access to accredited training material on school bullying. Training courses will be based on peer learning and crowd-sourcing techniques. Peer learning is defined as ‘learning from each other in both formal and informal ways’ and ‘peers’ are other people in the same situation. The emphasis is on the learning process, including the emotional support that learners offer each other. In addition, crowd- sourcing is a type of participative online activity in which learners can freely solve a problem and then share the answer to everyone. The combination of these two methods (peer learning and crowd-sourcing) seems to be an additional way to increase the effectiveness of training, while at the same time it enhances the sense of belonging to a community. The peer learning with crowd-sourcing method will be implemented through the usage of social networking software tool.
The main expected results of SONET-BULL will be:
- A Report on practices and competences in dealing with bullying in school communities (which will include Collection of best practices addressed to bullying and cyber-bullying, legal framework, real life cases)
- A peer learning methodology for dealing with school bullying (which will include learning needs, training domains and methodologies, assessment criteria, learning outcomes)
- Learning objects using crowdsourcing (which will include digital learning objects on school bullying, the peer learning methodology and the platform educational metadata profile; taxonomy of terms and concepts related to bullying; tag cloud; a set of 20 learning objects per country; a total of 50 comprehensive learning objects)
- A social networking peer learning platform (platform prototype and platform final version which will offer at least the following tools: Blog; Forum; Wikis; Tag cloud)
- The SONETBULL Guide on future exploitation and viability (which will present the exploitation results together with the finding and conclusions of the project).
Target groups:
In each of the four project countries, SONET-BULL will involve two learner groups composed of a minimum of 5 core users and 50 end-users among teachers, school leaders, teacher educators, parents and representatives of parents' associations, which will contribute to the development of the learning objects and test the SONET-BULL innovative social networking and peer learning platform.
