Young Digital Leaders Impact Report
Authors: Lucie Parker, Iris Boyer, Cooper Gatewood
Published: October 2018
This report presents the findings from our Young Digital Leaders project which was designed to equip young people aged between 13-16 years old in Italy, Romania and Sweden with the skills they need to be safe, powerful and effective online citizens in the 21st century, and to explore new ways of teaching digital citizenship in formal educational settings in Europe. The project pioneered a unique, collaborative partnership model between students, teachers, parents and local civil society organisations.
The project, piloted by Google and ISD, used trained local facilitators to deliver one-day workshops covering a range of social challenges relating to the online world, including fake news and propaganda, echo chambers, emotional manipulation and hate speech.
This report demonstrates the effectiveness of parent education and citizenship and the need for digital resilience training and education to be embedded within national curricula and delivered regularly over a longer period of time to a wider age group.