Internet Rangers get support from a LORD

Mentioned earlier in the blog that we had received great support from Stephen Timms and he has passed on details of our project to the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. Lord Mervyn Davies - Minister of State for Trade Promotion and Investment - sent us a letter too:-

" ... an excellent example of teenagers using their own spare time to help build community spirit and help their fellow citizens. I am delighted to hear of their efforts,"

On the school website too

Being on the school website too is really great because we are the enterprise hub school in Dorset, so lots of other schools check out what we are doing and could be inspired to form their own Internet Rangers group. This means that the digital divide will get smaller and smaller plus lots of older people in the local communities will be able to meet in schools with each other and also young people who they might not normally be in contact with.

Our focus event is in the local newspaper

Not just a little note but a great big section of the newspaper page! Ms Loughnan posted it up on the board in class when we arrived in the morning and we're all invited to meet with the Head Teacher on Thursday to discuss the project further.

We have had a look at our questionnaire responses now and feel we need to refine them a little before they are sent out to the wider group - which will be grandparents or OAP relatives of students. This will help us to gather a wider collection of data to direct our training course.

Internet Rangers by kimber

Internet Rangers by kimber

Focus event a success

Despite traffic congestion due to an accident and one of the team being held over in Bulgaria due to volcanic ash - all went well on the day. We had some lovely people from our local community who really enjoyed our mini-training session. They were kind enough to complete our questionnaires and provide us with plenty of feedback. Valerie Singleton was amazing, really energetic and interested in the BIMA challenge as well as the training scheme we were planning. She asked us to keep in touch and let her know how things progressed. Our local MP Tobias Ellwood came along to find out more about the digital divide and how we were planning to help older users. Plus our business partners came too - they seemed really pleased with the event as we had put their advice into practise. EVERYBODY liked the afternoon tea element - our research on cakes was accurate and we only had a few left to share at the end of the day!!! Oh yes, the local paper - The Bournemouth Echo came too - a reporter and a photographer so we hope lots of people will read about it and decide to come along when the training starts in July. To finish we went into the 3D cinema and everybody thought this was amazing, which made us realise how lucky we are to have it in school. We were nervous beforehand but Ms Loughnan said we were tremendous giving our presentation, very professional with our business partners and incredibly patient with our visitors using the Internet.

Press release

We have been asked to prepare a press release which most students might struggle with but thankfully we had to do this as a task in year 8 ICT for our project with Save the Children, so we had a good idea of what needed to be included. The person who is in charge of media for the school is going to do a press call on Wednesday, so we might get some journalists at the event too (note to get more cakes!) which is quite exciting but does add a bit more pressure. The good thing will be if we get our story in the newspapers then it could encourage others from both generations to get involved.

Vital research

This week we need to decide on a good selection of cakes for the event. We've raised the funding for our refreshments but need to purchase the goods on Thursday so we have it all in school for the event. It has been a lot of work getting to this point and even the choice of cakes is important as we want to present a professional image at the focus group, so that we can work well with our elderly visitors and our business partners.

Writing articles now

We have been asked to write about our project for Race on Line too - we hope this will help to get other schools and students involved in supporting people in their local community in the same way that we have.

Message of support

Even though it is officially the school holidays, work on the project has to go on as we are getting really close to our focus group event. We contacted some BIG digital names as well and were thrilled to get the following message of support from Martha Lane Fox who is in charge of getting all of Britain online by 2012:

"Congratulations to all the students from year 8 that are working so hard to
reduce the digital divide through intergenerational collaboration - it is
truly inspirational and a step towards a remarkable and digital UK"

Polish link

Early this year we had a "shadow" teacher from Poland who spent four weeks working with our form tutor. In September we are hoping to work on a joint project with him and his students. So we thought, as an international school, we could find out whether the digital divide exists in other countries too. We told him a bit about our project and asked whether older people were also excluded from digital technologies in Poland.



He replied -
"Hello,
Digital divide is a problem for many people in Poland (not only elderly people)... First, young...
Bye, Stanislaw"

VIPs

Working towards the event now and we thought it would be good to invite our business partners along. Then we thought maybe our local MP, Tobias Ellwood as he has come into school before and been supportive of work we were doing. He has agreed to attend and feels like us this is an important issue. Valerie Singleton will be launching the event for us as she too is keen to keep this issue in the news, so there will be local press attending too.

easter raffle

The next step is going to be on April 23rd when we have a focus group meeting with older people in the local community. We are going to talk with them and ask them to complete our questionnaires as well as showing them a few things on the internet.

We thought we ought to provide a cup of tea and cake at the event (especially as they were giving up their time to help us) and decided to raise the money to pay for this ourselves. We knew the school would be supportive and felt sure they would have covered the cost as we have already given up a lot of our own time to the project. However, we wanted to be responsible for every aspect of the process of building our working model so felt it would be good to use enterprising skills to finance the event. We bought some Easter Eggs and raffle tickets, then spent our lunch times selling tickets and raising the money we needed, which was just short of £30 - enough for the refreshments.

digital minister approves

We did so much internet research we found out that there was minister for Digital Britain - Stephen Timms. We emailed him to tell him about our project and this is what he said:

"In 2009 I was appointed Minister for Digital Britain, with responsibility for widening and improving access to the internet for everyone in the UK. Students are by far the best connected of all of our citizens, whilst the lower take-up amongst older people is something the government has been working to remedy. This project has put the two together, and I am delighted by your work on a model that will help older people to get better connected. The digital economy will be of growing importance in the coming years, and I am glad you have chosen to contribute to its success."

More research

It would have been pretty easy to just arrange an afternoon or two for some older folk to come into school and show them some ICT things but if we were going to do this properly we needed to do more research. We contacted Age Concern to find out if they provided any training and the local library service, both did have training available but there were people on waiting lists. This demonstrated to us that there was a real need for the training we were thinking of and that being in school we could provide ongoing support not just a quick course, then you were on your own which probably would be the worst thing for older people. We talked to our SEN department and also our systems manager to see if we might develop a portal on the school website so that our older students could revisit their learning and get further support. Everybody we dealt with was really positive.

Simplicity itself

As we really got involved in looking at the needs of our potential students, we came across a news article on the bbc news - it was about a company that designed software and hardware to suit the needs of older people or people nervous of using computers.




It seemed like a really good idea, so we got in touch and were pretty amazed that they thought we had a good idea to. Simplicity computers took the afternoon to travel over to the school and meet with us to see if together we might provide a working model that could be rolled out in schools around the UK.

Superb support

We were really pleased to find that local firm Redweb Solutions were willing to give us some business styled advice on our project. They came into school to meet with us and then invited us to their offices in Bournemouth to work with their designers for the afternoon. It made a big difference to us as it helped us decide on the persona of the older people we would hope to help and also what they might want to use the Internet for. It was brilliant being at the table, having a high level meeting with their team of staff.

Tuesday come what may

We have been meeting every Tuesday without fail since September 2009. We started with some general research and looked at what was already available for older people who might want to learn more about the digital age. There are just four of us in our group, so we all have to take on duties and do our fair share but it makes it easier to communicate as we are all friends and in the same tutor group. It also means we can work on things in the morning before registration and there is usually something to do every day. we are all pretty good at turning up each week, Beth deserves special praise as she came even when it was her birthday and when she had been to hospital for most of the day!

For the love of Ada

On Ms. L's classroom wall she has a "Wall of Fame" where there are pictures of inspirational people. She has four gold frames and if students do something amazing they get to appear on the wall with all the other greats throughout time. Ada Lovelace is on the wall because of her work with computers at a time when women were supposed to stay at home and sew or read the literature her father Lord Byron produced. We liked Ada and like her wanted to do something epic - so we decided to break down some divides like she did - only now it is a case of smashing the digital divide and closing the gender gap. If young people took on the role of teacher to help train older people how to use the Internet, then that would be two barriers for the price of one!

Got to thinking

We started to think about how older people will be missing out on so much because they might not know how to use the Internet. As we have grown up the Internet has always been there and we are used to it being a part of every day life. It seemed to us that there are people in our local community who are divided because they do not have the skills to surf the world wide web. So we set up a club called Internet Rangers to try and bring about some changes.