I wrote about my plans for my Digital Leaders a few weeks back and I know some people would like an update as they are trying a similar project, so here goes…

A digital leader is a child in my school. They are not just Year 6, we have a couple of Year 3 children too. They have all completed a Google form that asked their name, class and reasons they wanted to be involved. From this list of 50+(!!!) children, I picked the ones that I thought would work with the jobs I had in mind. Most jobs are weekly, some are occasional. For example, I am writing the draft of this post in the Year 3/4 ICT Club which is being run by Lottie and Olivia from Year 3/4. I am simply here because an adult must be present.

So what jobs are there?

  • Running 3/4 or 5/6 ICT Club
  • Blogging for our outdoor curriculum
  • Updating pictures on the website
  • Updating pictures on the TV screen in the reception
  • Setting up a webcam at lunchtime for us to watch animals in Africa

So I assigned children to jobs, they then decided when the clubs would run or whatever and began advertising. 3/4 decided to have ICT Club as freetime but 5/6 decided they wanted to try Scratch (we haven’t even used that in class yet). These are some of the things that they are doing, this is exciting and fab, but some of my more experienced leaders have more responsibilities.

As you may have read, we are doing a lot of blogging. Teachers are slowly coming on board and love the idea of uploading videos or photos but struggle with it, despite the guides to help. So what they do now is to transfer the video from the camera to a folder on the computer, complete aa digital leader Google form and answer some questions. This includes which class and where the video or pictures are saved. The digital leaders will come along, convert the video, create the animoto or resize the photos. They then save this as a draft blog post and the teacher then writes the blog post with her class. An example is here. They then complete a small form and put this in the teacher’s pigeon hole to say the job is done.

Also, one child has the job of downloading the .doc version of our weekly newsletter and converting it using Embedit.in and embedding it into our school website like this.

What next? Well I want to get my one or two experienced bloggers to share their learning with others. My top blogger will need to pass on information to the younger children too. I also hope to include them in trialling new software and testing my new cloud/online portal thingy too.We will also be getting a visit from some secondary Digital Leaders in the near future too.

They also have a blog and will start writing about their thoughts on here if they want to. I’m not sure if they will, but we shall see…

Here are some (very basic) files that you might want to borrow

Job List

Initial Letter – including application form