Behave Your Prints

About project

Capacity building in the field of youth

Today we live in a world driven by technology. Given that digital technologies have evolved in a relatively short period of time, we are faced with the fact that many young people do not have adequate knowledge and therefore use new technologies carelessly and irresponsibly.

They are digital natives, newly minted citizens of the busy online world. They grew up – and are still growing up – with texting, MSN, Facebook, Vine, and Snapchat. They are young, and they don’t care about privacy.

With this project, we want to support young people (14-18) to become active citizens in the digital society, by participating online responsibly and behaving correctly, in order to protect their online reputation for the benefit of their professional and social future.

PROJECT PARTNERS

What is a digital footprint?

A digital footprint or digital shadow refers to a person’s unique digital activities, actions, contributions, and communications that manifest on the Internet or digital devices. Our digital reputation is made up of all the things we say and do online, as well as what others post about us. It can affect our friendships, relationships, and even our job prospects for the rest of our lives, so it’s essential to be careful about the image we paint of ourselves online.

Today’s teenagers use many digital tools to document their lives on the Internet. However, they are unaware of the importance of digital footprint and reputation for their future lives. They still do not have enough life experience, or developed cognitive abilities, and are prone to critical mistakes that could negatively affect their digital reputation and future life.

Main Goal

This project advocates for the proactive use or addressing of digital media and technology with the aim of turning the online participation of young people and raising awareness of responsible behavior into a digital environment for the benefit of their future personal and professional development. The project will increase the capacity of the youth work sector to support young people, to become active citizens in a digital society, to encourage young people to create and edit digital content and to express themselves through digital means, raising the responsible engagement of young people online.

We will achieve this by applying a new methodology that will first be tested on 24 teachers and youth workers from 6 partner countries through training. After that, we test the BYP methodology on 24 young people who will participate in mobility and further transfer the acquired knowledge to 120 of their peers from 6 partner countries.

ACTIVITIES

1. Campaign to raise awareness about personal digital footprint – presentation of the project at the largest festival of digital, gaming and pop culture in the region – Games.com, Belgrade

2. Professional meeting – preparation of topics and educational material for the training scheme that will be developed on the digital tool.

3. Campaign to raise awareness about the innovative methodology of the *Behave YourPrints project in each participating country, so that in addition to the promotion, we will gather the best youth worker participants for the next training activity.

4. Training for youth workers on digital literacy covering a specific topic *digital citizenship, digital footprint, online identity – reputation and protection of personal online information.

5. Practical work in local communities

6. Youth exchange (testing an innovative approach related to digital citizenship education) + presentation on the last day at an evening social event where young participants present what they have learned – How to build my digital footprint

7. Dissemination of the project results through the campaign – Launching the platform