TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Michele Di Paola
This online training course aimed at discussing how digital elements as fake news and online contents as memes, videos etc could directly affect the quality of citizenship and the ways we have to express it. The covid pandemics forced us to move everything online and this was even more helpful to fully tackle the many issues of online activities too, in this framework of understanding what citizenship is and might be, when it comes to digital environments.
The target group of participants was an international group of 20+ people from all over Europe. The team was made by Italian trainers selected by Italian NA.
Having to move all the training course online, we decided to take advantage of the situation and use this training course as a collection of all the best practices we collected (and invented...) in digital youth work. So we set up a Discord server for the training, we defined short sessions connected on Zoom followed by asynchronous tasks, we tried to apply inclusive approaches working on different levels (text - visuals - audio etc) .
The training course also hosted a public event organized by Italian NA for the general public and offered in streaming from their FB page, with translation in English and sign language provided.
The discord server is still ongoing and hosts discussions and materials from all participants. Some of them organized local events and activities using what they learnt and shared there the results. An article for the online magazine TfL / Tools for Learning on the SALTO Educational Tools portal was written: https://educationaltoolsportal.eu/en/tools-for-learning/dear-digital-citizenship-we-should-talk . Another outcome of the training course is a talk show streaming on Twitch where the trainers' team every two weeks discuss different elements of digital culture, geek culture etc. : https://www.twitch.tv/the_gbu
I was a member of the team and I co-designed and delivered all the sessions and activities.