Ethical Hacking skills/careers talk with Cheryl Torano

New open publications

'Maddie is Online' has some amazing news to share. We have a couple of important publications that offer a detailed insight into the recent successes of the project.

The Queen's Nursing Institute

The first one is a blog post published by The Queen's Nursing Institute, which showcases the relevance of the work to School Nurses: ‘Maddie is Online’: Co-creating with young people for safer and resilient online connectivity (qnis.org.uk). 

School nurses play a pivotal role in the mental health and emotional wellbeing of children and young people, working closely with other school staff and parents to identify needs, ensure prevention, provide points of intervention, and offer timely access to available services and resources, instilling important skills and knowledge. School nurses’ specialist roles in encouraging a healthy and resilient lifestyle also expand to the online public health landscape. They are key in supporting children and young people to develop important skills (such as problem solving, communication, digital resilience) that are vital for navigating the online environment, building awareness and knowledge of online safety and encouraging positive online interactions with confidence. In these efforts, young people should be partners of proactive and evidence-based service development, within a constantly evolving online environment that presents many learning and creative opportunities, but also several risks.

We are grateful to everyone who has so kindly and wholeheartedly supported the project and contributed to it directly over the years. We have ideas for a follow up series that will address additional themes of online safety, resilience and connectivity (within the fast growing theme of generative artificial intelligence). We believe that not enough is done to engage young people directly with these themes and more support is required around empowering them with digital skills for a healthier, more resilient, ethical, creative and safe online environment for all. With special thanks to The Queen’s Nursing Institute Scotland and to the School and Public Health Nurses Association for supporting this project and its values.

Peer reviewed paper published in 'Computers in the Schools'

The second one is a paper published at the peer reviewed journal 'Computes in the Schools' (Taylor and Francis) Full article: ‘Maddie is Online’: A Creative Learning Path to Digital Literacy for Young People (tandfonline.com)

This paper explores young people’s development of digital literacy and resilience and discusses how teachers and librarians can play an important role in supporting young people to become digital citizens: informed, active, ethical, safe and responsible members of the online society. The research involved the delivery and evaluation of an interactive educational workshops that included an online cartoon series, accompanied by openly available educational toolkits dealing with topics of online resilience and safety in the online environment. The research involved a total of 239 secondary school pupils, across six schools and within a single local authority in Scotland. Anonymous qualitative and quantitative data were collected from the learning activities, which related to young people’s experiences, coping strategies and emotions in the online environment. The workshops empowered young people to open dialogue about challenging situations they experience in their everyday online connectivity and express their needs for further training. This work presents an innovative constructivist learning approach that can be replicated with young people to explore multiple challenges and opportunities they may encounter when navigating their online environment.

New website of 'Maddie is Online'

The project also now has a new website for easier access and navigation to the free online resources: Maddie is Online | digital skills (maddiesonline.com)