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2009-10
CIC students in frontline against online bullying
4 January 2010
Over 20 City and Islington College students recently
volunteered to be trained as Senior CyberMentors as part of an
initiative set up by the charity Beatbullying.
City and Islington College is one of only a handful of colleges
in the U.K. that have partnered with Beatbullying on this scheme
which aims to create an army of young people that help,
assist and support their peers in schools and communities.
The CIC students have also been promoting CyberMentoring across
England and Wales having been chosen by Beatbullying to support an
education campaign and to attend an event to celebrate the 20th
anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child held at
Lancaster House, London.
CIC’s CyberMentors have also been involved in a number of
awareness raising activities in the college in the run-up to
Christmas. They have sold Beatbullying wristbands, run
presentations to hundreds of students and created presentations for
the college's intranet.
Eugene Kelly, a student at CIC’s Centre for Applied Sciences,
spoke of his experience of supporting the mass cyber mentor
training exercise at the Google HQ;
"I enjoyed the day, Google HQ is amazing! I met new people, and
also was able to use some of my experiences since having been
trained to talk to them about the reality of the position."
Andre Bernal, from CIC’s Centre for Lifelong Learning, joined
Beatbullying at some speaker events at schools in Wales;
"I enjoyed the trip immensely and gained more experience working
with children. It also improved my experience with my
Cybermentoring, as the children told me of more websites and
personal experiences which will help me to mentor children more
effectively. This event was really good, as it gave me a load of
experience and motivated me to do more volunteering work in my
field for children and gain further experience and skills to become
a teacher."
Sasha Thompson, Centre for Lifelong Learning, attended the UN
Convention on the Rights of the Child. She explained;
"I participated by answering questions about the meaning and
history of the UN Convention. I learnt about general advocacy for
the protection of children’s rights and also the importance of
expand opportunities for children so that they can reach their full
potential."
Patrick Gifford, Senior Development Officer at Beatbullying
commented;
"City and Islington College has a fantastic group of
enthusiastic young people who are willing to help and will have a
huge impact on supporting those that have been bullied. They were
absolutely brilliant. Those that were selected to help promote
Beatbullying in West Sussex remained enthusiastic all day,
networked, spread the word about CyberMentors, ran workshops with
me, contributed to a podcast about the day and were great fun to
have as company. Real ambassadors for CyberMentors and CANDI and
naturals at it."
For more information about Cybermentoring please go to
http://www.cybermentors.org.uk/