I left New York City in 2019 after the incredible Google Innovator experience with the idea to create a Student Digital Leadership Playbook after engaging in the design thinking process around the challenge of fostering student mentorship when it comes to using social media. The problem is, I didn’t exactly know how to make it happen. I knew I needed students to provide ongoing feedback and to help give it a more student-centered feel. When Covid19 hit, it became almost impossible to even think about asking students to come on board to engage in the process. Despite encouragement from my Google Innovator mentor, Moss Pike, I had  just about given up on this project ever seeing the light of day.

Then, in December, I was speaking with my friend, Jen Giffen, who had a leadership class working on design thinking independent projects. I was able to work with Simon and Taniya from her class. Later, some of the student leaders from the Celina ISD SWAT team (mentored by Tisha Poncio) had a look and gave me positive feedback, and I was happy that Olivia Snyder created content and the how to get started video. And I was also lucky to get one of our own Global Educational Student chat student leaders, Anahit to provide additional feedback. Students at my high school, thanks to Dwayne Samuel and Jessica Ceci had the Specialist High Skills Major students act as a focus group and take the Playbook for a test run.

As with any design thinking project, I needed to iterate and tweak and am sure I will continue to do so. But, the students who did go through it, found it useful.

Why?

There is a huge inequity right now in terms of how students are taught to leverage technology (especially social media) in positive ways and yet, we need students to lead and shine online, now more than ever before. So much of the work we do around digital citizenship still focuses primarily on what NOT to do and not too many high school teachers have time within their curriculum to do some of this important work.

What is it?

The Student Digital Leadership Playbook is a website designed for students (13+) to use independently as a reach-ahead activity or guided by a teacher.

The SDL playbook is organized around a LEAD framework:

L: Student digital leaders learn and share learning;
E: Student digital leaders are empathetic and engage in multiple perspectives when posting online
A: Student digital leaders are aware (of their digital footprint, don’t fall for fake, and give credit)
D: Student digital leaders are role models for others and make the world a better place, in person and online.

The SDL Playbook may help supplement or complement some of the current digital citizenship lessons that tell kids what NOT to do, and instead help students with what they CAN do to shine online.

I called it 1.0 because I know that I will want to tweak it again or revamp it completely once more students and teachers use it. I already have a couple of students willing to work with me in the summer on what we feel needs to change.

In the meantime, I am both nervous and excited to share this project with the world in the hopes it is useful.

Student Digital Leadership Playbook link