Begin your digital journey
with a fresh approach to skills & confidenceWelcome to All Aboard! Are you keen to improve your digital knowledge, skills or confidence? If so, we’d love to help. All Aboard is a national project that aims to empower learners, teachers, and anyone who uses technology to support their work, their study, or other aspects of living in a digital age.
We have:
- developed a simple, fun (we hope!) way of thinking about digital skills (in the form of a Metro Map)
- produced and shared lessons and learning materials that anyone can access online
- promoted the use of ‘digital badges’ across a range of applications including, of course, digital skills
- worked in partnership with many organisations and groups, including supporting student engagement projects
- championed a focus on confidence, empowerment, identity, and wellbeing.
Interested? Then read on and start your digital journey!
Discover your own digital confidence profile by clicking on the image above and answering a few simple questions. (This is anoymous and only cumulative, non-identifiable, data is retained for statistical/research purposes)
Metro Map
Our Metro Map attempts to make sense of the increasingly complex digital landscape we all now inhabit. It has built on existing digital skills frameworks and ideas contributed from many people and organisations – and we gratefully acknowledge their work.
The metaphor extends the notion of exploration, journey and progress, alongside the separate categories in each of the metro lines, each of which corresponds to broad areas relevant to anyone teaching, learning, or indeed being creative in a digital space.
Stations
Each of the stations on the Metro Map corresponds to a topic and we’ve gathered together a variety of learning resources, links and other materials that should be of use to anyone seeking to extend their knowledge of those topics. In particular, we have also produced a number of interactive, multimedia lessons and associated digital badges (see later) with each of these. We will continue to extend this suite of materials and also welcome contributions from anyone who is willing to share on the same open basis.
Travelcards
Making your way around our Metro is made a lot easier through our travelcard scheme. Each special purpose travelcard lists a number of stations which you should visit. When you’ve earned the badge for each of these stations you qualify for the travelcard award. In other words, this is a flexible way of defining a mini-course, or curriculum. Anyone, or any organisation, can devise their own travelcard that’s relevant to their needs. The Student (Zone 01) card shown here, for example, is awarded to those who have earned the knowledge level badges: Understanding your smartphone; Internet research skills; Online security; Social media- protecting & enhancing your reputation; What is a virtual learning environment; Tools for learning.
All Aboard is a collaborative project, initially undertaken by NUI Galway, University College Dublin, the University of Limerick, and Mary Immaculate College Limerick, on behalf of the Irish Higher Education sector. All materials are openly licensed and additional contributions of similarly licensed content are most welcome. The project is funded by Ireland’s National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching & Learning.
Would you like to learn more about All Aboard?
Credit for header image
The photo is of Georg-Brauchle-Ring, underground station, Munich, and was taken by Thomas Hassel, released via flickr, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 licence.