Digital Leader Academy

North Tyneside Learning Trust

An impactful project

It’s no secret that I am a big advocate for student voice through the digital leader initiative. I’ve worked hard on the digital leader initiative over the years, having set up the digital leader network alongside Sheli Blackburn in 2007. My free book on digital leaders available from the iBooks store has been massively popular. I’m proud to have had such a big impact on digital leader groups in the UK.

I’ve seen the initiative become huge success stories for those schools that develop student digital leader groups. It was a natural progression from this that I developed the digital leader academy to try to bring more schools together to incorporate student digital leaders into their communities. This led to me starting my first Digital Leader Academy in North Tyneside following my support of the launch of the RTC (Apple Regional Training Centre) at Stephenson Memorial School in North Tyneside in June 2015.

Providing support and challenge for teachers and children.

What happened?

After working closely with Laura Dickinson, the eLearning Lead Practitioner for the North Tyneside Learning Trust and preparing for the Digital Leader Academy, I visited the school again in November 2015. Here we saw 8 primary schools come together to work with me to develop their skills in using Apple technologies. We undertook a variety of activities all linked to them hitting the ground running after having recently been successful in their applications to become student digital leaders.

What impact might you expect to see?

A fantastic way to support teachers in their use of technology across your school. Student digital leaders can support in many ways, particularly as a powerful student voice group on learning.

Support children in an authentic group of like minded children, develop their social skills and engage them more in developing your school.

A great way to focus your support of pupil premium children, student digital leaders end up confident and powerful advocates for learning in your school.

Another great way that digital leaders have had a big impact in many schools I have worked with is in supporting the school with its development of the new Computing curriculum.