Programme highlights and Digital Leader achievements over the academic year 2019/2020- Part 1
Published: 31st July 2020
As the school year has come to an end and summer holidays have begun, it is a great time for us to look back at the activities that have happened as part of the Digital Leaders Programme over the last year. Take a read through this two-part roundup of the year including the programme’s highlights and impact, as well as some of the brilliant achievements of Digital Leaders!
Adapting the programme through COVID-19 school closures
The end of this school year has been very different to other years due to the COVID–19 school closures. Back in March when the closures were announced, we adapted the programme to ensure that the young people were able to continue their online safety education and feel part of the Digital Leader community whilst learning from home. We have also extended all current subscriptions to cover the period of time that schools were closed and will review this extension again when the new school term begins. Take a look at our blog post about how the programme has continued to run over the last few months, ensuring that online safety stayed fresh in Digital Leaders’ minds while spending more time at home.
End of Term Leaderboard
Congratulations to the Digital Leader teams from Barnfield Primary School and Bellerbys College Cambridge who finished the school year top of the primary and secondary Leaderboards! Well done for your hard work earning points on the training platform this term and making you way to the top of the Leaderboard! We are excited to see which teams make it to the top next term.
New training modules
This year we released nine new training modules across our online platforms! Six of these modules were related to specific events such as Safer Internet Day and Anti Bullying Week, so were available on the platform exclusively for a limited period of time in the lead up to these events. These modules are designed to encourage Digital Leaders to engage with these campaigns. The other three modules are bonus training modules, two of which are for primary aged pupils and one is for secondary pupils and are on the topics of Safer Gaming and Data and Privacy respectively. These modules were developed in response to feedback from Digital Leaders, around what they what like to learn about on the programme. Thank you to JFS, Forest School and Sellincourt Primary, who were involved in creating these modules. The ‘Safer Gaming’ module was developed in collaboration with Roblox.
We’ve got some really exciting developments next year regarding our training modules so do keep your eyes peeled on our newsletter for more information!
Cardiff Regional Event
In November we had our fourth Digital Leaders Regional Event! This time the Childnet team travelled to St John’s College Junior School in Cardiff to host a Digital Leaders Regional Event for pupils from across the area. More than 50 young people were in attendance from several local schools. The event was an opportunity for young people to discuss online safety topics and collaborate on peer learning activities to take back to their own schools. The topic of the day was reporting, and pupils received training from Childnet’s expert team on how and what to report. To read more about the Regional Event look at our Regional Event blog post.
Industry Q&A
This year we released our first ever Industry Insider Q&A! The first edition of the series featured Laura Higgins, Director of Community Safety and Digital Civility at Roblox. Laura kindly answered some really fantastic questions that Digital Leaders had submitted. The questions covered many topics from reporting and safety in gaming to careers in tech. So many questions were submitted that we had to make the video into three parts! Thank you to all the Digital Leaders who submitted questions for the Q&A and thank you to Laura for taking the time to answer the brilliant questions. Take a look at Laura’s Q&A videos here.
Community Prize Posts
The Community part of our training platforms are an open and monitored space for Digital Leaders to discuss important online safety topics, as well as share peer-learning ideas and experiences. At the beginning of this year we introduced Community Prize Posts for secondary Digital Leaders. By engaging in these Prize Post conversations, secondary pupils are in with the chance of winning a monthly prize. Winning posts are selected from the most thoughtful, relevant and insightful of all of the responses to Prize Posts within that month. Congratulations to all of the winners throughout the year and thank you to all of the Secondary Digital Leaders who have engaged with these posts. We look forward to more thought-provoking online safety conversations on the Community next year!
Take a look at part two of this blog post for more highlights of the year!
