MONITOR
EDUCATION
to know how to protect their information
and themselves from potentially
risky situations.
Digital technologies are playing an
increasing part in today’s culture,
especially for children, for whom
schoolwork, online gaming and social
networking are among the most popular
activities. However, concerns about its
oram Life Education (CLE) is the
UK’s largest child health education harmful effects on the safety and
programme. For the last 25 years, wellbeing of children are rarely absent
from the headlines. The most harmful of
it has been teaching children the skills
these appears to be ‘cyberbullying’ – 38%
they need to make healthier choices
of young people have been affected by
through adolescence and adulthood.
cyberbullying (source: NSPCC). The aim
Their “SCARF” toolkit is an innovative,
of Coram Life Education’s bCyberwise
interactive range of resources designed to programme is for children to learn how to
equip and support busy teachers in
be respectful and safe online, and to
providing the best personal, social, health promote positive cyber citizenship.
and wellbeing education for their pupils.
Since the initial launch of bCyberwise a
This growing bank of SCARF resources
year ago, 300 sessions have been
has been put together at the request of
delivered by our trained Coram Life
schools and in late 2015 CLE applied to
Education (CLE) Educators across the
the WCIT Charity for funding to develop
country, benefitting over 3,000
and add a range of comprehensive
children and offering teachers the chance
bCyberwise resources for year 3 pupils
to observe lessons and to develop tools
(6-8 year olds).
and strategies for supporting pupils as
These resources are helping children to
they navigate the virtual world.
understand the public and viral nature of
the Internet, to recognise its dangers and
Contributed by Kat Collis,
C
Teacher feedback on bCyberwise
sessions:
“Really good, comprehensive lesson –
thought-provoking, sensitive and realistic.
Great to have someone coming in to
tackle this subject with a range of good
resources that I’d never manage to gather
together. Thank you very much.”
“The password game gave children time to
reflect on their password security and was
very personal to them. It made me think
about my own passwords too.”
On behalf of everyone at Coram Life
Education, thank you to the donors at
WCIT for their generous support of our
work, enabling us to deliver new
interactive resources that will help to
encourage children to be respectful and
safe on-line, we look forward to reporting
back in 2017 on the further positive impact
of these resources.
Year 3 Pupil
feedback
Senior Philanthropy Manager
WCIT Helps Launch
New MSc in
Data Science
A
new part-time MSc in Data
Science was launched in
October 2016 by the Department
of Computer Science and Information
Systems at Birkbeck, University of
London. The launch of this programme
was funded through the HEFCE
engineering conversion course pilot
scheme, with support from WCIT.
The MSc, covering both data science and
software engineering, is designed for
people who are new to computer science
but want an excellent grounding for
working as a data scientist or analyst in
industry. The course aims to give a broad
knowledge of computing and enable
students to acquire programming and
data analysis skills, as well as
comprehensive, practical problem-solving
and analytical skills. It will also give
students the opportunity to investigate an
area of current research in more depth via
Page 6
a project which
will have
industrial input.
For those
already working
in IT, the
programme provides an ideal opportunity
to strengthen and update knowledge and
skills in the areas of data science and
software engineering, while obtaining a
formal Master's qualification.
will exploit the opportunities provided by
the digital revolution, and create and
develop leading-edge, cross-disciplinary
research in the emerging field of data
analytics and data mining with the
continued support of WCIT.
The two most popular languages used for
data science applications, namely Python For WCIT members interested in
and R, will be taught and used on
contributing to the programme by giving
the programme.
guest lectures or seminars, offer
interesting project topics to students, or
Birkbeck has strong links to the City and
even applying to study the programme,
WCIT: some of its Fellows, including
contact details are at www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/
Dame Stephanie Shirley, were key to
study-with-us/postgraduate/msc-dataestablishing the Company. More recently, science.
the Birkbeck Institute for Data Analytics
Contributed by Dr Jon Hall, Chairman
WCIT Education & Training Committee