With the release of the New Zealand Ministry of Education's National Education Learning Priorities, there is now a clear alignment of online safety, wellbeing and safe learning spaces, prioritising its development within schools and kura.
For a long time, online safety education didn't seem to fit within a single New Zealand Curriculum Learning Area and learning was often confined to a one-week module at the start of the year.
However, student use of devices and online spaces isn't confined to that single week. In most schools and kura, use now extends across the year, weaving in and out of curriculum areas and across cohorts. This highlights that online safety and wellbeing aren't specific to one curriculum area but rather, need to be integrated into all learning.
Existing frameworks, such as school values and key competencies, provide the perfect scaffold for this and help to demystify some of the perceived complexity when supporting young people in this space.
Here at Linewize, we understand just how busy schools and kura are, and so to help facilitate online safety conversations and learning, we have developed the Progression of Online Safety Learning and Development (POSLAD).
Learning progression is spread across levels and is positioned under each of the five Key Competencies:
As with any guidance documentation, we encourage schools to customise and adapt the progression to suit their specific context and their wider community.
Direct curriculum links between the Progression of Online Safety Learning and Development (POSLAD) and the NZC are also provided. These links are not exhaustive and we suggest schools and kura identify other places where links to existing learning can be made.
Download and review our POSLAD document below to help create curriculum-based online safety lesson plans.