What is a Digital Leader?

Digital technology is a significant part of our everyday lives. We use technology throughout the day for all jobs and purposes. Therefore ensuring that all our pupils grow into responsible digital citizens who are able to use technology purposefully and safely is of upmost importance to us.

Digital leaders in Cookham Dean is an important role.

Every class has digital leaders who:

• Help children in our class to log in and access their work.
• Train teachers on new software
• Help maintain and ensure computers are charged
• We support our peers in lessons and help teachers by showing children what to do
• We help children keep safe online.
• We make films and experiment with new software
• We code and  program to make our own games.

As digital leaders we meet every week on Tuesday lunchtime. Maybe you could join us sometime!

We encourage our classmates to follow the SMART rules when working online:

Digital Leaders meet regularly with Mrs Satterley each week. During these meetings they look at different aspects of online safety. Digital Leaders are then responsible for delivering the key messages from their meetings back to their peers, in their classes and across school. We believe that pupils should be educated about online safety by not only their teachers but also their peers. Digital Leaders use presentations to educate classes and also to deliver whole-school assemblies. 

What work have we been doing this academic year?

Election Process – September 2022

During Autumn term, Mrs Satterley advertised vacancies for the post of digital leaders in each year group. The position would be for the duration of the academic year and each digital leader would be responsible for helping to raise the profile of online safety within each class from Years 1-6. Each class talked about online safety and pupils who were interested in the role had to put their name forward to their class teacher. Each class was then responsible, via a democratic process, of voting to elect their own digital leader.

Online Safety – November-December 2022

Digital leaders met during autumn term to talk about ways in which pupils can keep themselves safe whilst accessing material online and what they can do if they feel unsafe in any online situation.

Digital leaders had a good understanding of all the ways in which young people can make friends online through various social networking sites and apps they may have access to. They also understood that young people often spend the vast majority of their time online and wanted to reinforce what personal information should not be shared. This included names, addresses, school name, passwords and real photographs of themselves.

Digital leaders worked with Mrs Satterley to create a PowerPoint, which they could present back to their peers in class. The PowerPoint made sure to focus on who is really a friend online and how to deal with friends requests. Digital leaders were also able to advise in ways in which people could be blocked wisely and taught how to recognise and tackle cyber bullying.

At the end of the lesson, the class were asked to summarise the key messages they would be taking away and also who they would speak to in the future if they were worried about their safety whilst online.

Safer Internet Day – January-February 2023

This year, we celebrated Safer Internet Day on Tuesday 8th February. The theme was “All Fun and Games? Exploring Respect and Relationships Online.’ Digital Leaders worked together to look in greater detail at what respectful behaviour looks like and what to do in the event of this not happening. They created their own PowerPoint to take back to classes, thinking about the internet is used for, all the uses it has and explaining key vocabulary.

Digital leaders made their presentations to the whole school assembly. We made a short video on our school's attitude to computing and e safety made sure to collect feedback on the following questions:

• You read a message in a chat or live stream that makes you feel bad – what would you do?
• Your friend is upset but what someone has said to them in a game – what could you do?
• Your team beats another team – what would you say to the other team? What would be inappropriate to say?