Digital Leaders – a few students who help out or a great strategy to improve your school’s computing and ICT as well as develop your young people?

We now have a framework and complete set of Level 1 and Level 2 Digital Leader Open Badges. These are available for consultation during September and will be available via the Makewaves platform from the beginning of October.

I would like to outline my vision for developing Digital Leaders in my school and our main feeder primary using these badges. I want my students to qualify as level 2 Digital Leaders in the next 12 to 18 months. I also want the plan to be sustainable to continue producing Digital Leaders with ongoing capacity to improve ICT within both schools.

I am not going to worry about Level 1 badges. I know my Digital Leaders have been working and are capable of working at Level 2 and that is what I am going to get them working on.

There are nine badges:

Leader
Networker
Reporter
Creator
Educator
Presenter
Technician
Reviewer
Safeguarder

The Leader badge and the overall qualification can only be awarded when the other eight badges have been earned.

We meet tomorrow for the first time this school year. These are some of the activities we will discuss:

– agree a regular lunchtime for training and ‘hanging out’
– decide on tutor times to meet regularly (I want Digital Leaders to learn to run their own meetings)
– planning an introductory assembly for the new year 7s (part of the Presenter Badge)
– updating and getting new DL permission forms signed
– volunteer for, and organise, a rota for Digital Leaders to support the home learning club at lunchtimes (a regular weekly support commitment is essential for the Leader Badge)
– hold a teacher focus group to find out needs and requirements for training and support this year. This will drive a succession of badges for individual Digital Leaders through the year – Reviewer > Technician > Creator and Educator will all follow from this needs identification and working with individual teachers and / or departments through the year
– have initial training on earning badges on Makewaves including being a Networker and a Reporter
– eSafety is now a much greater part of the computing curriculum and I hope to develop this aspect further this year (Safeguarder Badge)
– individual Digital Leaders to create some sort of plan for each term so they can monitor their progress and achievement
– we will be using Google Apps for Education as well as Makewaves to carry this out

And some Digital Leaders will be looking through the new mission statements to see how they have already gained the evidence required during last year.

Anyone else interested in running a similar project in their school in the next year – please contact me via the contact form or @gr8ict on twitter. Come and find out more on twitter using the tag #dlchat at 9-9.30pm on Thursday evenings.