Hammond Students Learn ‘My Digital Life’

Hammond Middle School student Jayden Perez turned learning the My Digital Life program into a contest with his teacher. He was close to winning, but his teacher pulled ahead and won one day when Jayden was out of school.

Still, Jayden is singing the program’s praises. “I also had a good experience with it because it was actually pretty educational while fun at the same time,” he said.

My Digital Life, founded by a partnership between Neustar, an information services company, and EverFi, which brings technology free of cost to K-12 schools, allows students to use the newest technologies to improve their education while also developing a tech savvy mindset. At a Monday awards ceremony for the 65 Hammond students who completed the program, student Ahmed Shujah said the program was “really fun to learn.”

“(It was) much better than school,” he told his classmates. “It’s a really good experience for people who want to work as engineers, software programmers or people who just want to have fun on the web.”

Students in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades from Hammond 1, 2 and 3 were the first students in Northern Virginia to complete the program, a self-paced learning platform that they worked on during spare class time. Topics included digital literacy, cyber-bullying, wireless communication and the future of technology careers.

Talking with students Monday, Scott Blake Harris, Neustar general counsel and senior vice president, made the connection to the program’s technology and how students use video games, Facebook and YouTube.

“They were all invented by people like you,” he said. “They might be a little older, but not all that much older. And everyday there are people improving technology.”

Harris stressed the importance of STEM education (science, technology, engineering and math) in developing new technologies, especially for girls. “If we don’t, our entire country will not be as successful as it should in the future,” he said.

Tom Davidson, CEO of EverFi, talked with students about what they learned in the program.

“It’s kind of cool how you learn because a lot of times — I bet the adults in the room would have a lot to learn about this, I know I did — you even learn things about how this stuff works, right?” he asked. “Which is not even what you put online but even just how this stuff works, like how wireless towers work, how cell phones work.”

Elizabeth Hoover, executive director of technology for ACPS, said the participating students’ new knowledge and skills make them more informed consumers of technology and more responsible citizens in the online world.

“I think being able, at this age, to identify cyber-bullying, and knowing how to support your classmates and friends in situations like that, is really important,” she said. “What this program does, is it gives them the opportunity to practice their skills.”

Morton Sherman, Alexandria City Public Schools superintendent, said he was impressed with what students told him they learned from the program, including how to be good digital citizens and show respect online.

“This program, this online approach, I think really spoke to them at their level, their interest level, their ability to understand a really tough topic,” Sherman said.

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