This banner is designed to be displayed on websites to direct young people aged 8-10 to the ‘Cyber Cafe’ where they can get information on internet safety and advice in a fun, friendly way.
Daily Archive for November 23rd, 2009
I have created a questionnaire to assess young people’s computer skills and internet safety knowledge.
The purpose of this is to compare the results of a group who are just finishing a Princes Trust Course to those of a group next year that would have been exposed to emerging technologies throughout the course. Another purpose of the survey was to confirm which social networking sites are most popular and how the students access the internet and e-mail.
The questionnaire was given out to nine Princes Trust students aged 17-23. I hope that when I compare these results to the next group, a clear difference will be visible in internet skills and capabilities using technologies.
One of the questions was ‘Which Social Networking Sites Do You Use?’, if students used more than one they were able list them.
The findings shown below clearly show that Facebook is the most popular site and that more people do not use any at all than use MySpace, Bebo or Twitter.
I also asked how the young people access the internet. Over half of the students had a PC at home and a third had their own laptops. The use of the internet and Facebook is increasing on mobile phones and some of the students used their game consoles for the internet.
Other interesting results included; over 75% of the students used hotmail for their email and 33% of the students didn’t have access to the internet at home.
This backs up our idea to set each student up with a professional e-mail address not only as some hotmail addresses can be unsuitable but also so that those without the internet are not excluded from applying for training, information and employment online. With many companies using e-recruitment and e-mail as contact it is important that are students have the right skills and knowledge to do this.
My results also showed that many of the students lacked computer skills that a lot of young people would take for granted and are essential when applying for training or employment. By incorporating computer skills into the programme the students would leave with invaluable experience and knowledge that will help them progress to the next stage of their lives.
This week I took on the challenge of updating the version of Word Press that we use. Having started this blog over 2 years ago, it was extremely dated and lacked many of the features that the new versions had.
Although the blog may not look radically different to viewers it was quite a task to back-up, update and launch the new version which is completely different from an admin perspective!
After running into a number of compatibility issues and having a few scares I am pleased to announce that we are up and running and ready to go!
This is one of the many examples of how social media is spreading across organisations and being used as a resource for communitities.
