The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has launched a ‘Cyber Security Handbook’ for students of classes 9 to 12. The handbook discusses topics such as digital security, digital rights and responsibilities, and digital law.
The handbook comes in the wake of the novel coronavirus outbreak and the subsequent nationwide lockdown that has forced many schools to move their teaching online. CBSE said that there is an “assumption that young people have superior skills with digital technology” although they are among the most vulnerable groups when it comes to cyber crime.
“Many of them (students) frequently struggle when applying them to research tasks. They can find it difficult to work out whether information on an unfamiliar website is trustworthy, and rely on their chosen search engine’s rankings for their selection of material,” said the board in the handbook.
The new module covers topics in cyber safety, such as cyberbullying, social exclusion, intimidation, defamation, emotional harassment, online sexual abuse, cyber radicalization, online attack and fraud, and online enticement. It will also introduce the nine elements of digital citizenship — digital access, literacy, communication, etiquette, health and wellbeing, rights, freedom and responsibility, security and law. The CBSE handbook also explains cyber bullying and cyber stalking and details the good practices to be followed online so that students do not engage in unlawful activities.
