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On the concept of Digital Leaders

Digital Leaders is a concept used in my school to incorporate students into the tending of Firefly which teachers (no matter how well meaning) don’t want to do.

In my school however we are lucky enough to have a lunchtime meeting every week focused on making Firefly better.

My students can’t be trusted!

I know what you may be thinking ‘that’s insane! if I can’t let my students work independently then how can I allow them to work on a fundamental part of our school.’ to be fair at our school we had the same idea but we tried the idea and to our surprise it worked.

Infact, to ensure all Digital Leaders behave as instructed you should require all candidates to digitally sign a contract where if they are not behaving and/or are not attending meetings, they will be relieved of their duties as Digital Leader.

How to begin a Digital Leaders team

First of all it is a great idea to advertise this to students which will tell them that this opportunity is available and also for the pupils with such interest tell them a time and location to meet you for an interview. Next, you may want to ask questions about what they will bring to the role of Digital Leader such as blog writing or other skills alike. Other questions include, what would you do to make e-learning better at school? Do you use Firefly often? It would also be a great idea to ask these students to create a mock page on anything they want! Once these stages are complete you can choose your applicants and when other pupils apply these trusted Digital Leaders can do this process for you.

Making your team work efficiently

If you have gotten to this point you probably think that it will be difficult to manage your selected students but what if I told you that you don’t have to manage them at all. In fact, they can manage themselves while you can direct them to working successfully. Put them into teams and appoint those teams to different subjects to ensure that the team stays productive and works hard every meeting and even outside of these meetings to meet teachers that may need assistance.



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