Ahead of the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory, the Social Fund of Russia and Rostelecom released a special module of the Internet Alphabet program focused on searching for information about participants of the Great Patriotic War online. The new training course is focused on the basics of search operations, to help users understand where to start looking for missing or deceased relatives, their awards, burial sites, wounds, heroic deeds, and combat histories.
The course includes descriptions of useful online resources and algorithms for handling them, as well as recommendations on composing inquiries to government agencies in case they are required in addition to online searches. In particular, it covers detailed instructions on dealing with websites like Podvig Naroda, Pamyat Naroda and the Memorial database: from registration to downloading, copying, and saving the found information.
The training materials also review methods for searching published information about Soviet soldiers and provide step-by-step instructions on how to independently add data about the combat history and heroic deeds of notable individuals to these databases.
The new training unit called Searching for Participants of the Great Patriotic War Online has already been posted on the Zen channel of the Internet Alphabet project and will soon be published on the program main portal, Azbukainterneta.ru.
Note that the Internet Alphabet project hosted a whole series of themed events dedicated to the Victory's anniversary this year. One among them was the Thank You, Internet 2025 nationwide contest, where a special category, 80 Years of Victory: Living Memory of Heroes, was announced. 638 stories about the heroic deeds of the Soviet people were submitted to the category.
In April, an online conference for teachers and organizers of the Internet Alphabet courses took place. A significant portion of the materials presented there was focused on the Great Victory's anniversary. Its participants received information on how to prepare for the Victory Dictation and took part in masterclasses focused on using specialized online resources to search for information about the heroes of the Great Patriotic War. During the workshop, they also shared experiences on how to create May 9th-themed postcards and slide shows using archival family photographs from the times of the war.
The Internet Alphabet is a joint project of the Social Fund of Russia and Rostelecom that involves training coursed for seniors, publishing teaching aids and a textbook. The training course and the internet portal of the same name, Internet Alphabet, have been developed under a cooperation agreement between Rostelecom and the Social Fund that provides for teaching computer literacy to retirees. Its major goal is to facilitate access to online government services for elderly people and to improve their quality of life through mastering computer literacy and using the internet.
All Internet Alphabet materials are in public access.