In April, I had the privilege of visiting the Digital Leaders at St Anthony’s Clayton in Bradford. They are participating in the Bradford Digital Leader Academy programme and I was visiting to see how they were getting on and was warmly welcomed by Year 3 teacher Miss Falconi who leads the Digital Leaders at the school.
The first thing I noticed during the visit was a file containing all the information from Digital Leader meetings and the activities they had undertaken including pictures of the recent assemblies they had delivered. This is a great way to record all the activities they are involved in. The children meet every couple of weeks and record actions from each session on an action plan to ensure they can achieve their intended outcomes.
The children had already delivered two assemblies since our last training session and are considering some training sessions for staff around specific technologies. The school has a focus on blogging and the children were discussing how they might deliver some staff CPD around this.
The first assembly was to introduce themselves as Digital Leaders to the whole school and explain their roles as Digital Leaders across the school. They also launched a technology ‘help box’ with custom made slips aimed at staff who can submit slips for help with anything related to technology. They have had some responses already but feel they need to raise further awareness of this across the school.
The second assembly was around Online Safety delivered to the whole school and covered the theme of what personal information was and who you should share it with. They used the Smartie the Penguin resource from Childnet (www.childnet.com/resources/smartie-the-penguin) to demonstrate what children should to do when they come across online content they are unsure about. The feedback from staff and pupils was very positive after this assembly and they have clearly covered the criteria for the Presenter Level 1 badge.
The children have also worked successfully with some classes using Green Screen technology and iMovie and have been asked to create some basic instructions for staff and children to help them use the Green Screen technology themselves. They have also supported a ‘Creative Minds’ KS2 after school club using Green Screen for performance poetry around the poem Jabberwocky that was well received.
Some of the children have started communicating with me about their activities on Edmodo and I expect some requests for Level 1 badges shortly and Miss Falconi has seen an improvement in the children’s confidence in technology and in general since the training.
I look forward to hearing more from the school in the near future.
