1. Social media is now part of the woven fabric of everyday life, particularly for young people wether it be
texting, facebook, twitter or catching the latest clip on youtube. Social media offers practitioners a cost
effective & powerful tool to engage with a vast & diverse audience from their desk tops. Online Youth
Outreach is a specialist company focused on delivering the solutions to remove these barriers and optimize
social media as a key tool in youth provision services. There are a variety of courses & solutions we can offer
depending on where your organisation is in the journey to adopting social media and realising the potential.
Please email Katie Bacon for more information info@katiebacon.co.uk or follow on Twitter @Katie_bacon
Presentation notes from Online Youth Outreach
Living and learning with New Media; Summary findings from the Digital Youth Project
Ito, Mizuko, Heather A. Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia G.
Lange, C.J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson (with Sonja Baumer, Rachel Cody, Dilan Mahendran,
Katynka Martínez, Dan Perkel, Christo Sims, and Lisa Tripp.) Living and Learning with New
Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. The John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning, November 2008
http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/report
http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/
Digital Youth Work practice model
Different professionals have different roles in supporting young people. The right response for each
professional will depend upon:
· Their job role;
· The sorts of activities they already work on to support young people;
· Their professional ethics;
· Their technical skills;
· The available technology within their organisation;
Even then, there is not ʻthe youth work wayʼ, ʻthe social work wayʼ and ʻthe teenage pregnancy co-
ordinator wayʼ of using social media – there are variations within each profession. You can think of
the responses as running on a scale from ʻAwarenessʼ to ʻOnline working and outreachʼ
· All practitioners need to have awareness of social media – and to be able to
understand that social media impacts upon young peopleʼs lives.
· It is important that all practitioners are aware of both the opportunities and risks of social
media, and are able to respond as required to young peopleʼs needs with this awareness of
social media in mind.
· Practitioners can support young people to understand, explore and navigate growing up
in a social media rich world.
· This doesnʼt mean practitioners have to use social media in their work, or be digitally savvy.
But practitioners can provide the space for young people to talk in peer groups about
issues of online identity or online behaviour, or they can make sure they take account of the
Internet when designing projects.
· For example, recognising that photos are often shared online by young people after events,
a practitioner might spend time discussing with a group some ground-rules for photo
sharing – using it as an opportunity to get the group thinking about the content they put
online.
Katie Bacon info@katiebacon.co.uk @Katie_bacon http://www.onlineyouthwork.co.uk

2. · Practitioners can use social media as a tool – whether to get content for face-to-face
sessions, working with young people to create content and share content online, or
extending face-to-face work through online discussions.
· There are many different ways in which social media can be a youth practice tool for
practitioners who take time to develop the skills to use it – and who make sure their use of
social media in their work is built on safe-and-sound foundations.
· Later in this document you can find a range of examples of how social media can be used
as a tool for practice.
· Practitioners can develop online working and social media outreach. The approaches
listed above all extend face-to-face work. You can also use social media to develop new
forms of online practice and projects – where work with young people may take place solely
online, or where your work may start online instead of face-to-face.
· Social media tools can be used to promote new projects. You can also adopt a community
development approach to online spaces – thinking about the forms of content and
conversation that could be encouraged by practitioners playing a constructive role.
The Youth Work and Social Networking report (Davies and Cranston, 2008 http://
www.practicalparticipation.co.uk/publications/) sets out a ʻYouth Work perspective on Social
Networkingʼ and explores how the professional values of youth work can be used to inform youth
work through social networks and social media. It can be useful to work out your own social media
practice by starting from your goals and professional values. T. Davies, K. Bacon; Youth Work &
Social Media,Training Handbook: November 2009
Examples of Digital Youth practice
Film clip - Young womenʼs project practitioner sharing her experiences on attempting to use new
media tools http://vimeo.com/19213517 (Bacon 2011)
Film clip - Young peopleʼs views on social media and online support
http://vimeo.com/18342915 (Bacon, 2010)
Film clip - Youth workers sharing how they plan to use new media in their practice.
http://vimeo.com/23957946 (Bacon, 2011)
PLINGS project http://www.plings.net/
Film clip on PLINGS http://vimeo.com/9067722 (Flower, 2010)
Savvy Chavvy - Online forum for Gypsies and young travellers
Film clip - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7so_HuWBnvA
Katie Bacon info@katiebacon.co.uk @Katie_bacon http://www.onlineyouthwork.co.uk

3. UK Webpages for young people & youth practitioners about online safety:
Think you Know - http://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/
CEOP - http://www.ceop.gov.uk/
Cybermentors - http://www.cybermentors.org.uk/
Digizen - http://www.digizen.org.uk/
UK Council for Child Internet Safety - http://clickcleverclicksafe.direct.gov.uk/index.html
Great new media tools to use with young people.
Animoto: turns your photos and video clips into professional video slideshows in minutes. Fast,
free and shockingly simple http://animoto.com/
Audioboo: a mobile & web platform that effortlessly allows you to record and upload audio for your
friends, family or the rest of the world to hear. Really easy to use!
http://audioboo.fm
Wordle: a tool to generate “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater
prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text
http://www.wordle.net
Online Youth Outreach
Katie Bacon info@katiebacon.co.uk @Katie_bacon http://www.onlineyouthwork.co.uk

4. Katie Bacon info@katiebacon.co.uk @Katie_bacon http://www.onlineyouthwork.co.uk