After 2 years of deep development work, the Skill IT for Youth project is now complete! The results were launched in Youth Work Ireland’s National Office to great acclaim during this seminar on January 22nd. The feedback received was excellent:
Around 30 people attended the seminar including youth workers and senior managers of youth services, staff from other non-formal education institutions working with disadvantaged young people, representatives from Universities, the National Youth Council, and some specialist NGOs working with certain groups of young people such as migrants.
As well as sharing with them the highlights of our Research Report – the most up to date document of its kind on Digital Youth Work in Ireland – and presenting our Policy Brief to them, we demonstrated, directly from the live project website digipathways.io, the three highly practical tools we designed specifically for the Youth Sector to help ease digitalisation at every level of the organisation:
- The Digital Learning Planning for Organisations provides a self-assessment tool and guidance to embed digital technology into your youth service or club in a truly youth-centred fashion, and an online course to take your organisation through this process using Design Thinking.
- The Competence Framework for Digital Youth Work Practice is an innovative and sector-specific way for youth workers to assess their competence level, receive feedback and advice, and grow their career and their ability to facilitate young people’s digital learning
- The Training Toolkit for Youth Workers & Educators to Deliver Digital Skills to Young People supports staff and volunteers with very detailed hands-on scenarios to facilitate digitally-based activities for young people
We also collected their views on Digital Youth Work policy at European level to inform our EU-level Policy Brief.
Finally we asked them to input their feedback and their first impressions of the tools via Mentimeter. As shown above the responses were overwhelmingly positive: people were very impressed with the tools, found them very relevant, usable and innovative, and most importantly they all felt that they would definitely use them in their work and knew others who they could useful share them with. We ended the half-day seminar with a nice networking lunch.
