Guest Blogpost from Stretton St Matthew’s CE Primary Digital Leader Team

Published: 3rd March 2021

Hello! We are the Digital Leaders at St. Matthew’s CE Primary. We started our Digital Leaders training last September with the aim of fostering increased awareness of online safety throughout our school community. We use a display board, the weekly newsletter, our Twitter feed and school website to keep everyone updated. We are keen to keep thinking of fun and interesting ways to raise awareness of all aspects of online safety.

This year, for Safer Internet Day, we decided to record an assembly for our school to watch during their live lessons. We discussed TRUST and various scenarios and reminded everyone to QUESTION, CHECK, ASK. We also decided to reinforce the SMART rules. Finally, we set the whole school a challenge to create a poster, song, animation, quiz or rap about the SMART rules.  Individual classes also completed additional work such as reading an online safety story or debating real or fake news.

We hope to carry on and complete the rest of our modules before the end of this academic year.  We plan on announcing an exciting competition at the beginning of the summer term and we’ve been planning more engaging activities to share our learning. For example: we plan on creating an emoji quiz, which is a code breaker activity.

We’ve learnt so much being Digital Leaders and really enjoy the responsibility of helping others learn more about online safety. Our top tips are: don’t share personal information, don’t talk to strangers, don’t click on any pop ups and have a trusted adult nearby. Remember to question, check and ask if you are unsure about anything.

Thank you to the Digital Leader team and Mrs Pawson at Stretton St. Matthew’s CE Primary for letting us know how they have been impacting their school community! If you would like to share your Digital Leader achievements and feature in a blogpost or in the community newsletter, get in touch at leaders@childnet.com.