Digital & Innovative Education
Digital Literacy, Internet Safety and Social Media
Confiscating the phone ends the disruption and teaches nothing. This week names the mechanics instead — streaks, autoplay, the notification timed for bedtime — and turns the European Commission’s own list of them into lessons your students can run themselves.
Duration5 days · 25 hrs
LanguageEnglish (B1+)
Group sizeMax 20
CertificateAttendance+ Europass Mobility
FundingErasmus+ eligible
AudienceAll school levels
Why this is Erasmus+ eligible
Structured, multi-day programme (5 days) with a pre-defined schedule and learning outcomes — not a passive lecture format.
Built around interaction: participants engage directly with the trainer and with peers from other countries throughout the course.
Transnational by design — open to participants travelling from outside the host country, a core requirement of Erasmus+ mobility funding.
Overview
A phone confiscated mid-lesson solves the disruption in front of you. It teaches the student nothing about why the app in their hand was built to be hard to put down. That is the gap. Most internet-safety guidance handed to teachers stops where the confiscation stops: rules about behaviour, nothing about design.
Every lesson you build this week is tied by name and number to a single competence. That sounds like bookkeeping, and it is the opposite. “Internet safety” is a topic, and topics are hard to teach and impossible to assess. But 4.2 protecting personal data and privacy and 4.3 protecting health and well-being are two different jobs — different lessons, and different evidence that a student can do them. The list those competences come from is the European Union’s own: DigComp 2.2, twenty-one competences across five areas, published by the Commission’s Joint Research Centre in 2022. This course’s three subjects land on three of the five areas — information and data literacy, safety, and the communication area where netiquette and managing a digital identity live.
The design question gets its own day, and a source. In July 2025 the European Commission published guidelines on protecting minors online under the Digital Services Act, and they are unusually specific: streaks, read receipts, the “… is typing” indicator, visible counts of likes and reactions, autoplay, push notifications timed for the hours children should be asleep, scarcity and urgency cues, and intermittent or random rewards. The guidelines are not binding law — the Commission uses them to assess whether platforms are meeting their obligations. For a teacher they are something better than a rule. They are a list, written by the regulator, of the mechanics a class can go and find in an app they already have open.
There is machinery behind you as well, and most teachers never hear about it. Every member state runs a Safer Internet Centre through the Insafe network, and the Better Internet for Kids portal is where you find yours. You do that during the week, and you write down where your own job ends and theirs begins. By Friday you have a short unit — three or four lessons for a real class, each one tied to a named competence, with the gaps you found on Monday closed. You teach it to the room before you take it home.
Methodology
Named Competences, Not Topics
Every lesson built during the week is tied to a numbered DigComp competence, so that what students are supposed to be able to do afterwards is written down before the lesson is designed.
Work on the Apps in the Room
The design sessions run on applications the participants and their students already use, audited against the Commission’s own list — not on demonstration accounts or hypotheticals.
Taught Before It Leaves
Nothing goes home untested. On the final day each participant teaches part of their own unit to the group, and revises it on what actually happened.
What you'll take home
Map what your school already teaches onto named DigComp competences, and identify which of them nothing in your curriculum currently covers.
Teach evaluation of online information as a competence with observable evidence (1.2), rather than as a checklist students recite and ignore.
Explain to a class how a recommender feed is built — the difference between what they told the platform and what the platform inferred from their behaviour — and why the two produce different feeds.
Run a lesson in which students audit an app they already use against the design features the European Commission has said should be off by default for minors.
Teach digital identity and netiquette (2.5, 2.6) as things students practise rather than are warned about, and state where your role ends and a safeguarding process begins.
Daily programme
- Icebreaker: each participant writes down the last thing they told a class about being safe online, without naming a rule. The notes come back out at the end of the day
- DigComp 2.2: five areas, twenty-one competences, and the three areas this course works in — with an honest note on what it leaves out
- Why a named competence beats a topic: what changes when “internet safety” becomes 4.2 protecting personal data and privacy and 4.3 protecting health and well-being, two jobs rather than one
- Where your school already teaches these without calling them that
- Working session: each participant marks, competence by competence, what their students can currently do and where the gaps are. That gap list is the specification for everything built this week
- Warm-up: the same query run by everyone in the room on their own device, then the results compared out loud
- 1.1 browsing, searching and filtering: what a results page is selling, and what students believe about the order things appear in
- 1.2 evaluating information: the competence usually reduced to a five-point checklist. What to teach instead, and what counts as evidence a student can actually do it
- 1.3 managing information: where work is kept, who else can reach it, and what happens at the end of the school year
- How a recommender feed is assembled: signals a user gave on purpose against signals inferred from their behaviour — time spent looking, what was clicked — and how to make that visible to a class in one lesson
- Output: one lesson for 1.2, written for a named class, with its evidence of success
- 4.2 protecting personal data and privacy: what a minor’s account discloses by default, checked live on the participants’ own devices
- 4.3 protecting health and well-being — the design session. The Commission’s Article 28(1) guidelines name the features: streaks, read receipts, the “… is typing” indicator, visible like and reaction counts, autoplay, push notifications during sleeping hours, scarcity and urgency cues, intermittent or random rewards
- What that list gives a teacher that a rule does not: a mechanic a student can find, name and switch off themselves
- The status of the guidelines, said plainly: not binding law, but the reference the Commission uses to judge whether a platform meets its obligations — and why that distinction matters when a parent asks
- 4.1 protecting devices, briefly and practically
- Output: a lesson in which students audit an app they already use against the guidelines’ own list
- 2.6 managing digital identity: the account as a thing that is built over years, and how to teach it before there is anything to regret
- 2.5 netiquette: norms as something practised in the room rather than posted on a wall
- 2.3 engaging in citizenship through digital technologies — the half of social media education that is almost never taught, and what it looks like at school level
- Where a lesson stops and a safeguarding process starts: the boundary written down, in your own school’s terms
- The channels that exist: your own country’s Safer Internet Centre in the Insafe network, and the Better Internet for Kids portal behind Safer Internet Day. Each participant locates their own centre and records how to reach it
- Output: the third lesson of the unit, plus the boundary note that goes with it
- Each participant teaches a fifteen-minute segment of their own unit in small groups, with the rest of the group as the class — the only honest test of a digital-literacy lesson is whether it survives an audience with phones
- Feedback on what the group actually did rather than what the plan intended, and one selected segment taught again to everyone
- Revision time: participants amend their unit on the strength of what happened, not on advice
- Course evaluation and reflection on learning
- Certification ceremony
Please note: sessions run from 09:30 to 15:00, Monday to Friday, with a break for lunch. Timings can shift a little to suit the venue and the group. If you'd like a specific topic covered, let us know when you apply — the confirmed day-by-day schedule is sent to registered participants ahead of the course.
Certificate: we issue the Certificate of Attendance to everyone who's present for at least 80% of the course — tracked with the daily sign-in sheet (see Certificate & assessment).
Equipment: a few of our courses ask participants to bring a laptop — check the day-by-day programme above, or ask us if you're not sure.
Need a formal invoice or proforma for your school's records? Ask us — we issue official invoices with the participant's name and course details.
Course page last updated: 4 September 2026
Materials & tools
Vuorikari, Kluzer and Punie, DigComp 2.2: The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (Joint Research Centre, 2022) — published free of charge, and the framework every lesson built this week is tied to
The European Commission’s guidelines on the protection of minors online under Article 28(1) of the Digital Services Act (July 2025) — the source of the design list used in the Day 3 audit
The Better Internet for Kids portal and the Insafe directory of national Safer Internet Centres — used on Day 4 to locate your own country’s centre
Your own device and the applications your students use, which are the working material of the Day 2 and Day 3 sessions
A short unit of three or four lessons for a named class, built across the week, taught on Day 5 and revised afterwards
Certificate & assessment
This is a Certificate of Attendance, not an exam-based qualification — recognition comes from completing the structured programme, not from passing a test. The real, lasting value is in the competencies listed above under What you'll take home.
Type your name above — clearly marked "SAMPLE" in the PDF, not an official document.
The real certificate is signed by your trainer and EMA's authorised signatory. Your own signature isn't on this document — it's captured separately, on the Europass Mobility document.
Need to verify a real certificate? Check it online using the serial number and participant's full name, or contact us directly — [email protected], OID E10304561.
Attendance
Tracked using a sign-in sheet with one signature per participant per day (paper or digital). This record is used to issue your Certificate of Attendance and Europass Mobility document. View sign-in sheet (PDF)
Output
Every participant leaves with a completed Dissemination & School Impact Plan — a step-by-step template for applying the course back at your school (see below).
Feedback
An end-of-course evaluation form is sent to every participant after the course ends — a chance to reflect on what you've learned and how you'll apply it, and it helps us keep improving the course for future participants.
Your paperwork
Keep your travel tickets, boarding passes and (if you used green travel) any related receipts — your school or National Agency may ask for these for their own Erasmus+ reporting.
How to prepare
Have one real class in mind before you arrive, with an age and a subject. Everything built during the week is for that class, and the unit written for “our students” in general is the one that never gets taught.
Bring your own phone or laptop, with the applications your students actually use already installed on it. Day 3 audits a real app, live, and a description of one from memory does not work.
Please do not bring students’ accounts, screenshots or examples of their online activity. Every audit during the week runs on the participants’ own devices and accounts, which keeps the children you teach out of it.
Come with an idea of what your school’s current position is: whether there is an acceptable-use policy, who deals with an online incident when one happens, and whether anything in the curriculum already covers this. If you do not know, that is worth finding out before you travel — Day 1 starts there.
Practical information
Registration & documents
Not sure how registering works or what paperwork is involved? See our full Registration & Documents guide — from applying to your Certificate of Attendance, in one place.
Invitation letter
Need a formal invitation letter for your school or embassy? Request one — we send it within 2 business days. See a sample (PDF).
Learning Agreement
Prepared by our staff and sent to you and your school once your registration form is submitted — see what it looks like. See a sample (PDF).
Billing & invoicing
We issue official invoices/proformas with the participant's name and course details — ask us. Payment is due in full by bank transfer before the course start date. See a sample (PDF).
Airport transfer
Guidance on getting from the nearest airport to the venue is included in your welcome information.
Accommodation
We can recommend partner hotels close to the venue in the host city — ask us when you apply.
For your school / proposal
School impact
After completing this Digital & Innovative Education course, the participating staff member can transfer outcomes directly to their school: a short briefing for colleagues sharing the key takeaways, applying relevant tools or strategies from the programme in their own role, and inclusion of the course materials in the school's professional development resources — turning one person's mobility into a wider institutional gain that supports the school's European Development Plan. Use the Dissemination & School Impact Plan below to fill in your own — it saves as you go and can generate a one-page summary for your coordinator too.
0/5 sections started
Write your answers in English — it keeps every teacher's plan consistent if your coordinator compares several.
Filling these in ties this plan to a specific mobility — useful if your coordinator collects plans from several courses/teachers.
Staff-room dissemination session
Step 1 of 5
Photos of the session or sign-in sheet are embedded straight into both PDFs — they aren't autosaved, so re-attach them if you reload this page. The link above IS autosaved.
If you're presenting, base it on the course materials — a summary slide for colleagues rarely needs more than 15–20 minutes.
Classroom or institutional application
Step 2 of 5
Name the real class, year group or school process you'll apply this to — not the course topic itself.
Institutional resource management
Step 3 of 5
School / European Development Plan link
Step 4 of 5
Give the admin a one-page summary: what the course delivered, the cost, how it feeds into the school plan, and the expected outcome.
Follow-up & impact check-in
Step 5 of 5
Your check-in date is before the planned application date in Step 2 — check-ins usually happen a few months after you've actually applied the course, so there's something real to report.
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After the course
Participants will receive their certificates (Certificate of Attendance + Europass).
Participants will complete a general course evaluation and event survey.
Participants will receive course materials, videos, photos, and PDF documents in both digital and print formats.
Follow-up support: an email group is created for idea exchange, self-evaluation materials are provided, and participants receive a follow-up check-in after 3 months — long enough for the unit to have been taught to a real class rather than a room of colleagues, which is the version worth comparing notes on.
Frequently asked
This course is an eligible training activity under Erasmus+ Key Action 1 (School Education Mobility) — the course fee, travel and subsistence fall within the eligible cost categories. Whether it is covered depends on your own project's approved grant agreement and your National Agency's rules; we provide all the invoices, attendance records and certificates your National Agency requires for reporting.
B1 is enough — you do not need to be fluent. Trainers speak slowly and plainly, every session is built around doing something rather than sitting and listening, and groups are mixed by nationality so people help each other out. A rough test: if you could follow a staff meeting held in English and ask a question in it, you will be fine here.
Absolutely — group bookings of 3+ from one school receive priority placement, and we can schedule a dedicated session for groups of 12 or more.
Our courses run on request at our centres in Antalya, İstanbul, İzmir, Mersin, Budapest, Bremen and Rome. Tell us your preferred city and dates and we will arrange a session.
Tuition, all course materials, both certificates (attendance + Europass Mobility) and a half-day guided tour of the host city with a local guide. Flights, accommodation and travel insurance are booked separately — we send a vetted hotel list.
You can move to any later session free of charge. Cancellations made 30+ days before the start date receive a full refund; a reduced refund applies closer to the date — see our full Cancellation & Refund Policy for the exact schedule.
They meet at the edges and do different jobs. The cyber-bullying course is about what happens after an incident — the first ten minutes, the reporting route, the written protocol a school follows. This one is about what students understand before anything goes wrong: how information is evaluated, how a feed is assembled, what an account gives away, and how the apps are designed. This week draws the boundary explicitly and shows you where to hand over; it does not teach incident response. Schools often send one person to each.
No, and we would be the wrong people to ask. The week works the other way round: students audit the applications they already use against a list the European Commission itself published, and find the mechanics in them. A ban is a decision for your school and it tends not to survive contact with a phone; being able to name why an app holds attention is portable, and it works on the next app too.
€80/day€400 total · 5 days
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What's included
25 hours of training & materials
Certificate of attendance
Europass Mobility document
Half-day guided city tour with a local guide
Not included
International flights / travel to the host city
Accommodation
Travel & health insurance
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Registered Erasmus+ provider · OID E10304561
Where our participants come from
Aggregated across all EMA courses, not specific to this session.
Romanian
23%
Polish
14%
Lithuanian
10%
Spanish
7%
Portuguese
7%
+ educators from 19 more countries across Europe and beyond
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