Cyber Safety and Ethics: The Curriculum Perspective

The new Australian Curriculum highlights the importance of safe, ethical and responsible use of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) through an aspect known as a 'General Capability' (ACARA, 2014). The idea behind general capabilities, is that they stretch throughout the whole curriculum, across all learning areas, as a type of over-arching idea. This blog is looking specifically at the ICT General Capability. The idea is that the general capabilities are not taught as stand alone subjects as such, but are to be intertwined with each specific learning area. For example, in English we will soon be looking at publishing a book review. If we were then to go and publish these reviews to an online forum, we would first need to look at behaving safely, ethically and responsibly within that particular website, as well as generally on any website. This would be an example of working the general capability of ICT into a specific subject area. This is a small example, but shows how the general capabilities are said to be implemented into different subject areas. Below is a diagram that can be found on the Australian Curriculum website that displays the different areas of the ICT General capability, as you can see, the top section is what we are focusing on. The next post will discuss this section in greater detail.

'Organising Elements of ICT Capability'
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority
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