We are pleased to announce the latest addition to the Univention ID Broker. KNOWBODY, a young and innovative company, now makes sexual education more interactive and personal than ever before. Using videos, short games, 3D animations and even voice messages, students are introduced to the topic in a unique way. Read on to learn more about the exciting possibilities of this app from Carolin Strehmel.
Univention ID Broker and KNOWBODY
The Univention ID Broker allows you to quickly and easily introduce the app KNOWBODY and many other educational offerings to your schools through a standardized interface. As a software-as-a-service offering it combines single sign-on and access to the learning context. With their UCS@school login, students and teachers have direct access to educational offerings that can provide individualized content through the learning context – all pseudonymously and with data minimization in mind.
With the ID Broker, we are able to make our application available to users in an easy way and with little effort. For example, there is no need to register and set the twentieth password. – Carolin Strehmel, Co-Founder and Developer of KNOWBODY
Getting to Know Yourself and Dealing with Boundaries
KNOWBODY is a sex education app for 6th graders and up. It includes interactive learning units about relationships, sexuality, gender, body and empowerment. These fit exactly into a school lesson and are designed to help teachers cover the topics anchored in the curriculum in a school semester.
As the name suggests, young people should be empowered to become a KNOWBODY themselves: Because in order to feel safe and comfortable in one’s own body or set boundaries for others, it is a prerequisite to know and understand it.
Sexual education is more holistic in the curricula than it is currently practiced in most schools. We surveyed students and 72 percent said they had never talked about sexuality in the media. 68 percent had also never talked about sexual violence and consent. According to our survey of 490 teachers (KNOWBODY, 2022), this is mainly due to a lack of time.
Simplifying Lesson Design and Planning
KNOWBODY is designed to help spread sexual education across more subjects and grades. By bundling the topics in one place and greatly facilitating lesson design and preparation, cross-curricular teaching becomes easier. For example, learning units on relationships, gender, or empowerment could also be covered in religion, philosophy, or politics.
We provide teachers with a pedagogical manual. In this manual you can find a short description of the tasks, a timetable and further help to prepare for the lesson. During the lesson itself, students and teachers have the same version of the app on their tablet or cell phone, available for iOS, iPadOS and Android.
The learning units follow a similar pattern but do not have to be covered in any particular order. Throughout the units, you will always find so-called “task cards”, that provide some input and a definition of the task. They also tell you whether you are working alone, in pairs, or in a small group. Quite often we use the think-pair-share method, which allows students to talk to each other about what they have learned. That is, of course, if they want to.
If you have any questions about the app or the Univention ID Broker, we would be happy to receive your comments here on the blog.
