The Childnet team are happy to announce that the Digital Leaders Programme has recently reached two milestones! Take a read below to find out more about these milestones and how the programme has developed over the years.
How the programme started
The Childnet Digital Leaders Programme began with the aim to engage young people in online safety education in new and innovative ways. By speaking to young people directly, we found that they found online safety education more valuable and relevant when it was delivered to them by people their own age. By directly consulting with young people, teachers and educational settings, Childnet created the programme to give young people an opportunity to take the lead in online safety education, making it more impactful overall. The programme started in 2014 with just a few pilot schools.
How the programme has grown
The programme has grown tremendously over the last 6 years, impacting more and more young people in Primary and Secondary schools every year. Take a look at our Digital Leader Group map below or on our Impact and Reach page, which shows the reach of The Digital Leaders across the UK and beyond. As well as growing in reach, the programme has developed significantly over the years, now offering more participation and collaboration opportunities to the young people and schools engaged with the programme.
To date, the Childnet team have run four Digital Leaders Regional Events across the UK as an opportunity for Digital Leaders to meet, receive exclusive training and collaborate on ways to impact their school communities.
Other developments include the community newsletter which features monthly programme updates and announcements, and a programme Twitter account, @ChildnetDL, to showcase Digital Leader achievements.
The programme now also has a youth representative board, the Digital Champions, who help the Childnet team to ensure the programme remains youth led. We have seven Digital Champions who represent a youth voice, which is essential to the programme’s success. Learn more about the Digital Champions here and read part one of their guest blog post about their responsibilities and plans for the year ahead here.
Recent Milestones
We are proud to announce that the programme has recently reached two milestones. The programme has now had over 1000 subscriptions and over 4000 Digital Leaders have completed the training, qualifying as Childnet Digital Leaders!
Congratulations to all of these qualified Digital Leaders and thank you for contributing to the success of the programme. The programme relies on the support of dedicated teachers who lead the programme in their school and support their Digital Leaders in impacting their school communities, so a big thank you to all school staff who have been involved in their educational setting.
Digital Leaders are always impressing the Childnet team with their creative ways of sharing their knowledge and impacting their school communities. Take a look at some brilliant Digital Leader achievements here and make sure to keep an eye on the blog for regular programme updates and Digital Leaders achievements.
We are excited to see which milestone the programme reaches next, how it will continue to develop and what the Digital Leaders will achieve over the coming years.
Welcome to the December post of our monthly achievements and updates blog. Here we congratulate schools who have completed their training over the past month and share good news stories from Digital Leader schools.
Well done to the Digital Leaders teams from the following schools who have recently completed their online training!
Barnfield Primary School – 2nd cohort!
Bredon School – 2nd cohort!
Bromley High School Juniors – 3rd cohort!
Clayesmore Preparatory School – 2nd cohort!
Cumnor House School for Girls
De Bohun Primary School – 2nd cohort!
Highworth Grammar School
The King’s Ely Secondary School
Northampton High School Junior – 2nd cohort!
Oakington Manor Primary
Reed’s School – 2nd cohort!
Royal Masonic School for Girls – 3rd cohort!
Royal Russell – 2nd cohort!
Sawtry Village Academy – 2nd cohort!
St Martins School
The Belvedere Academy
The King’s Ely Secondary School
The William Henry Smith School
Cardiff Regional Event
Last month we had our fourth Regional Event in Cardiff. The event was an opportunity for young people across the region to collaborate on ways to share their online safety knowledge with the pupils at their schools. The young people also received exclusive training from the Childnet Education Team who present sessions and workshops at schools all over the country.
Thank you to the schools that attended the Digital Leaders Regional Event in Cardiff, thank you to the Digital Leaders in attendance and the teachers who supported throughout the day. Special thank you to St. John’s College Juniors for hosting and Ms Howells for working with us on the event. Your preparations helped to make the day run smoothly!
Digital Leader school visits
Danielle visited Moss Park Junior School last month to see what their Digital Leaders have been doing and to hear about their plans to share their knowledge with the rest of their school. Thank you to the Digital Leaders for spending time talking to Danielle, she was really impressed with your hard work!
Digital Families Hackathon
Thank you to the Digital Leaders from JFS who came to the Facebook Digital Families Hackathon event. Max, Jessica and Eva, your contributions were valuable and we are grateful for your participation and input.
Anti-Bullying Week 2019
Well done to all of the Digital Leaders who celebrated Anti-Bullying Week and Odd Socks Day in their schools. Thank you to all of the Primary and Secondary Digital Leaders who completed the ‘Run activities for Anti-bullying Week 2019’ module on the training platforms and told us about the activities they had done to celebrate. Look out for a blog post featuring a roundup of the activities that Digital Leaders told us they did in school to celebrate Anti-Bullying Week and to help stop bullying in their school.
We particularly liked this tweet from Bromley High School Juniors, showcasing how their Digital Leaders led Odd Socks Day in their school with their funky odd socks!
Congratulations to Grovelands Community Primary School Digital Leaders
Digital Leaders from Grovelands Community Primary School made a video about Screen time and are featured on the ‘social news’ section of their school website, well done team! https://grovelands-school.co.uk/
We love to see Digital Leader groups getting creative with how they can share their online safety knowledge and Grovelands Digital Leaders clearly learnt a lot from the Screen Time and Healthy Balance module!
We challenge your team to make a video to share what you learn in the next training module you complete! Let us know what your Digital Leader team have achieved to be featured in this blog or our community newsletter!
Please share with us what your Digital Leaders team have been up to. Email [email protected] or tweet us @ChildnetDL#ChildnetDL to be included in the next update!
Welcome back to a new school year, we hope you had a great summer break and are eager and inspired to make impact as a Digital Leader in your school and community!
In this blog we have put together some top tips to help Digital Leaders make a great start to the school year (as well as providing some handy information for teachers), helping you to kick off a fantastic year of online safety education in your whole school.
Our back to school top tips:
Make activities and sessions relevant to your audience
Why not get the other pupils in your school to think about some key questions like: What did you do online over the holidays? Have you or any of your friends experienced anything online over the holidays that other pupils or parents would benefit from hearing? Make the activities you run in school engaging and effective by keeping them relevant and up to date!
A great way to start your first team meeting of the new term is to discuss the things you did online over the holidays, as well as what you learnt about life online.
Engage the new pupils at your school
This September your school will have lots of new pupils coming in to year 7 and it is a great opportunity to let them know where they can go for support with questions about online safety. Why not use this as a chance to think about what you have learnt as a Digital Leader, and how you can share this with them?
Remember: you have a really important role which can inspire the new pupils to want to become Digital Leaders too!
Plan your activities for the whole year
The start of the school year is a great opportunity to plan for the whole year ahead, and to make sure that you are having the biggest impact possible in your school throughout the year! Take a look at our online safety calendar to pick out the campaigns that your team would like to involve your school in (link to online safety calendar).
Inspire your peers by becoming a Digital Champion
Exciting news alert: We are recruiting even more Digital Leaders to join our team of Digital Champions! Our Digital Champions are a group of Secondary pupils who are great examples of what it means to be a Digital Leader. They are ambassadors of the programme and act as our youth representative board.
If you are a qualified Digital Leader, would like to support us in creating modules and developing the programme and help us to make sure the programme is reflective of young people’s experiences, then please apply!
Take a look at last year’s Digital Champion profiles and look out for more information about how to apply to be a Digital Champion in the next few weeks!
Get creative
There are so many different ways to share knowledge in your school community and we always love to see how original and creative Digital Leaders can be.
Last year Digital Leaders made t-shirts, hosted Digital Picnics, made films and so much more!
For the new school year we challenge you to be creative in sharing your online safety knowledge and keep us up to date with what you achieve to be featured in our blog and newsletter.
Collaborate with other Digital Leaders across the UK
We encourage you as Digital Leaders to share ideas and work together in your teams (and with your teachers) to maximise your impact!
The ‘Community’ section of the Digital Leaders platforms is also a great space to share your ideas and top tips, or to get advice from other Digital Leaders. As the new term starts make sure you keep an eye out for our ‘Prize Posts’, these are new Community posts from the Childnet Digital Leaders Team where you can get some great rewards if your share your opinions on topics and questions set by the Childnet Digital Leaders Team.
Keep up to date
Stay up to date with what is happening in the Digital Leaders community. We will now be sending our monthly community newsletter to Secondary Digital Leaders as well as Digital Leader teachers. We love to keep you updated and share the accomplishments of Digital Leaders!
Information for Group Leaders
Let us know if your Digital Leaders have their own top tips or want to share what they have planned for the year ahead! Tweet us @childnetDL or email [email protected].
We can’t wait for our next Digital Leaders Regional Event on 25th November which is taking place in Cardiff and is an opportunity for Digital Leaders across the region to collaborate with each other. Get in touch at [email protected] if your Digital Leader team would like to attend the event.