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Champagnat Global Week 2024: Digital risks at school and education on healthy and safe use of technology by students

Fourth day of Champagnat Global Week 2024

The fourth day of Champagnat Global Week 2024 began with a few words from the Executive Secretary of Champagnat Global, Javier Llamas, explaining the programme that is being carried out during this week. Afterwards, the Director of the Secretariat of Education and Evangelisation, Br José Sánchez, welcomed all the participants and led the prayer dedicated to Br Basilio Rueda.

We had the opportunity to count on the participation of the Executive Secretary of RIMES, João Fett, the Network of Universities was born from ‘a desire for international cooperation’, explained João.

As he explained, at the beginning of the 2000s, representatives of Marist universities from all over the world met to share experiences in Curitiba (Brazil) and RIMES was born. ‘We are very happy to participate as friends in Champagnat Global Week, our relationship with the network of schools is one of strong cooperation and synergies’, concluded João. The executive secretary of RIMES then introduced the conference: Digital risks at school and education in the healthy and safe use of technology by students, given by Rosa Pérez, co-founder and director of Gaptain.

The conference began by explaining the development of a tool by the speaker after seeing some of the risks and problems posed by technology in young people: ‘Each age group of a minor, depending on how they use technology, has an associated risk’, Rosa said.

After analysing whether the risks were real through the participation of different schools, the conclusions established that 59% of pupils aged 10-12 have a mobile phone, 21% recognise that they spend too much time on the internet and social networks, 72% go online at night, 65% of pupils aged 10-12 have one or more social networks, 74% play online regularly with people they do not know, 38% claim to know all their contacts in person and 14% have placed bets online, among others.

‘In Spain there was a trend to ban mobile phones for children under 16″, explains Rosa and poses the question: “Technology yes or no”, but…. ‘Are digitalisation and technology a choice nowadays?’ asked the co-founder of Gaptain.

‘Technology has risks but also many opportunities’, Rosa said and explained the ways to reduce these risks: educating for a safe and healthy use of technology. The aim is to achieve digital wellbeing, which, as Rosa explains, ‘is to try to find a balance between the use we make of technology every day and the rest of our activities’.

There are many ways in which teachers can make the most of technology with their students: ‘just telling them that we are going to use technology is an extra motivation boost’.

Rosa then showed how the Gaptain tool works, with a 360º and online programme. She explained that in each classroom a diagnosis of digital risks, coexistence and digital competences must be made and from there we extract the data. We try to get to know the students through the diagnosis: to know the digital risks to which they are exposed, we observe coexistence and we talk about digital skills.

Everything that is proposed to the students must be attractive and while we make a gamified process. ‘It is not the same for us to ask the student something ourselves as it is for us to do it through technology,’ he explained.

Once we have all the data, we automate it through Artificial Intelligence. By analysing the data, we observe the risks that exist and that need to be worked on and we can extract the risks of each individual student. Regarding coexistence, the tool can be used as a reporting channel and we will obtain a sociogram to determine the positive and negative relationships in that classroom. Finally, the level of competences can be obtained. From this diagnosis we can know what state the classroom is in.

After obtaining the analysis of the classroom, the next step is to try to improve what we have found. Therefore, once the analysis has been completed, we obtain a didactic unit adapted to the results. These units have adapted content so that tutors can use them in the classroom.

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