1st in BIMA Challenge

On 5th July we won first prize in the National BIMA Challenge. We were presented with the award at Channel 4 TV and the school will receive a Windows 7 Touch and Media System from Microsoft. We were judged on our project idea but also on the use of digital media, so this is a superb achievement.

Invite to No.10

Great news for the project, we have been granted a Prime Big Society Award from No.10 and will be going there to a celebration event! We are all so pleased to have such recognition for the project and it will be great to share the news with our senior students.

Certificate of Achievment

In the post today we got a certificate of achievement in recognition of our commitment to learning and the work we do at digi steps. Ms L said we are going to need a wall of our own in school soon ;o)

It is really great though because visitors will see we are serious about what we do and hopefully even more senior students will come along.

Working with BT

Glad to report that the training session with BT went well. All the resources we produced will be used by their staff and volunteers now to work with their local schools, which means many more silver surfers will be supported in the race online 2012. It is great to know that what we have done in Bournemouth is now a model in other schools.

cabinet have been in touch

Just heard that we are on the "short list" for the Big Society Awards - it all feels very official when you get an email from the cabinet office! Now keeping our fingers crossed for the final stages.

On the news

We are going to be featured on the news on Wednesday, the day we are going to the national digital conference, so everybody else will get chance to watch it before we do! We filmed today and our senior students were really good, so hopefully they will enjoy being on the news too. Our team t-shirts arrived from America (check out http://www.teesatrisk.com/) so couldn't have been better timed. More about the tees later - have to pack for the conference :o)

TES Awards

We have made it through to the short list for these awards which Ms Loughnan says are like the Oscars of education, so that can't be bad. We are in the final six!

Training BT Volunteers

Have been invited to launch a roll out of school training for BT volunteers at the end of May. This will be something that the employees can opt to run in their local schools throughout the UK, so brilliant news as it means more and more folk will be getting support with the world wide web and also making links with their school children.

National Digital Conference

Just confirmed today that we will be attending on 11th May - at Old Billingsgate, London. Really exciting because there will be so many people to talk to about work on digital inclusion - like minds and all that :o)

Rumour has it some TOP people from government will be there and Rebecca Ferguson is going to be singing to finish the celebration!

After Dinner Speakers

Invited to the New Forest Rotary to present an after dinner speech about our project. Luckily we were finished by 9pm so not too late for a school night.

On TV

If you didn't get the chance to see it last night, we were featured as Community Champions on the Community Channel:


http://communitychannel.mediatrust.org/featured/community-champions

The Times

On Thursday 3rd March we appeared in "The Times" and also the "Bournemouth Echo" so it has been quite a week for media! We also used some of our lottery funding to place a half page advert in our local paper alongside the editorial - we felt this made good business sense as people were more likely to respond if they had read the article.

We have also recruited four more buddies so that our newer members can take on some of the teaching whilst we focus on our BIMA challenge, marketing and building the website.
Busy, busy, busy!

The Tenner Tycoon Poster Girls

Well we have had so many new senior students today - perhaps they saw the article in "The Daily Telegraph" of us launching the "Tenner Tycoon Challenge" with enterprise.uk and Peter Jones - that was the BIG secret!!! He is a giant in business and made us feel quite short during the photo shoot too. We had to stand on a platform to get to his height. It was all great fun though and really exciting to meet with a real, live, famous, entrepreneur. He was very friendly, polite and glad to know our project was going well.

Miss Loughnan showed all our group the photo's and our silver surfers were delighted, to see us with a celebrity business figure and featured in the national papers. Like real business folk, we finished the session and went straight into a meeting with Redweb - they came to advise us on web design before we start building our site for the BIMA challenge. They know soooooooooo much and it was very, very useful to get some industry advice before we get started. All the content is ready, the brand is good to go so it is just a case of building now and testing it with our group.

BIG Secret

Can't say too much but a very exciting day on Friday 18th February - when most people were easing into half term, the digi steps original founders were travelling up to London for a photo shoot! A M A Z I N G

KT - Equal

Three of our newest team members ventured to London on project business for the first time. They attended a conference on digital exclusion with top university researchers and agencies.


Apart from dramatically lowering the average age of delegates, they were able to listen to the most current thinking on how to overcome this problem as well as share details of their own project which got a lot of support, although one elderly attendee wanted to know if they could run classes in the school holidays too - so certainly keen to get more from the concept!

No.10

Having been nominated and given Diana Awards, the organisation contacted us to see if they might help us roll out our project on a national level. They were having a meeting at No.10 on 15th February and wanted to highlight our project - of course we said yes, because we are currently building our new website which we hoped would prompt others to get involved. With the Diana Award organisation behind us as well, this will help a great deal in getting other schools and community groups to take on our project.

BT Award

We were visited by BT and given an award plus a cheque for £2,500 for our project. It was a great afternoon and the film cameras were out again plus the "Bournemouth Echo" came to interview us. All of our senior students gave us a round of applause which was lovely, they are so supportive and generous. Keran was included in the photo's and award presentation because she is our longest standing student. Each week she brings us all some fruit as a thank you for our hard work and so we presented her with a lovely V & A china mug. Although, our project is based around technology, we are finding the benefits of bringing our local community together just as important.

Filming for Spring

The community channel awards team came to sunny Bournemouth to film our project. The senior students enjoyed the limelight just as much as the teenagers and all are looking forward to seeing the film on TV in the spring. It was also another opportunity to explain digital media and all of the options available to our silver surfers.

New identity

Yesterday was epic.

We had our new identity unveiled thanks to the support we have had from top design agency Heavenly in London. Following on from our meeting with them at the end of last year, their creative time worked with the feedback we gave and came up with the perfect brand toolkit. We can't wait to use it and will be designing our first newspaper advert tomorrow so that we can attract more elderly people in our community to our weekly sessions.

Then the Community Channel turned up to film our afternoon session and all our "senior students" were so pleased to take part with us. When we were being interviewed it made us realise what a bond we have now, how important it is to give your time to something worthwhile and the difference it can make to another person. We went well over our usual time slot but nobody minded - they were glad of the extra opportunity "to do a bit more" on the computers.

Ms Loughnan reminded everybody that next week would be something special but she hasn't told us why! We have tried catching her out but she is giving nothing away - so watch this blog .....

Google support

Today we received some great T-shirts from Google! They feature Albert Einstein who was known for his bright ideas, so we feel proud to have got such encouraging support from the giants of the internet.

As e=mc2 so springs to mind another equation:-

internet rangers + senior students = no to digital exclusion

We will wear our T-shirts for our next training session, they will be a super visual prompt for our silver surfers and might help them remember the surfing skills we are developing :o)

Hello Israel

Tonight we were fortunate in having a web conference with Itai in Israel who has designed software specifically for senior users to access their email. We were able to see a demonstration of the software and our very own eloquent senior student, Robin was able to add his viewpoint too. It was really useful to consider the design features that Itai had identified as we are in the process of building our own website so want to make sure like Itai that we have considered all the factors. We are going to trial the software and send our feedback to Itai at Red Stamp Mail. Also, as we are part of the Digital Inclusion Network we have sent him details of our contact at Age Concern so that other silver surfers here in the UK might take advantage of the software features.

It was such a positive experience and good to know that all sorts of individuals and companies are looking for ways to attract the older population to digital technologies.

Plans for 2011

We started the year with a planning meeting before launching into lessons again. We have split back room duties between marketing and the web team as there is a lot to do besides our regular teaching slots. Good job there are eight of us now!
On 11th we were glad to see our regular students return, as eager as ever to learn more about emerging technologies. Also, we had a visit from Alex who works for Bournemouth County Council - he spoke with us about our training and spoke to our students too. He was really impressed by our work and said he would "spread the word" as best he could to encourage more folk to come along. After that our business partners Redweb came by to catch up on progress for the BIMA challenge. Beccs came with Martin, as she is a project manager and wanted to show us how we could use Project Manager to schedule our work. It was really interesting but also quite a shock how quickly we arrived at the end of April. This is our deadline for the web build, so we now know just how important it is to do the planning. Ellie was elected project manager and Martin said she will have to shout and be bossy to keep us on track ;o)