Transcript

Absolutely. And I too was a practitioner myself but I had moved into researching the professional learning of teachers and educators. And I had moved into sort of looking at social media, and how social media had come into our lives, and how that might be harnessed for professional learning, and how it’s being used with children and young people in schools. As I started to explore the attitudes and use of the teachers and educators, I realised that actually we really needed to explore the world of the children and young people, and to bring that voice to the table. And talk about personal motivations, I mean, was part of my own curiosity of how to engage with this social media in a safe but really useful way, to have to harness it whilst also dealing with the ethicality of it. And so I did bring teachers and children from a wide range of ages together with educators through the Festival of Social Science into creating a social media charter. And, through that, we then used the social media charter with work with the charity and looking at widening participation with disadvantaged children, and working with them to explore how digital literacy could be developed, and to hear that children’s voice strongly and let the teachers and educators working with them to hear that voice.