NGO, Facebook, organize digital training for 250 secondary school students

An NGO, Young African Leadership Initiative (YALI) Kaduna Network, in collaboration with Cc Hope and Facebook on Tuesday trained 250 secondary school students in Zaria on digital technology.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the training was held at the Hall Mark International College, Zaria, Kaduna State.

Speaking at the opening of the one-day training tagged: “Safe Online Digital Skills”, the YALI Coordinator in Kaduna State Zone, Alhaji Fahad Ahmed-Chikaji, said the essence of the workshop was to enhance the students’ capacity in digital skills.

“We want to enhance the students’ capacity in digital skills like the social media, facebook and other social handles in making good use of such as well as the dos and don’ts on those social media,” he said.

He said the programme was very relevant to the studies of the selected students, observing that in today’s age, almost all the students from JS 3 to SS 3 had android phones.

ALSO READ: Rainstorm wreaks havoc on Kogi school

According to him, most times, students end up using their smartphones on negative things that drive them away from their studies.

“Therefore, students of these age bracket need serious guide to save their studies, reputation, society and their country.

“Security-wise, the situation is bad, we lack security and all of these problems are caused by rumour mongering on the social media. So, it is good we draw their attention on what to post and what not to post.

“If things are allowed to go the way they are, we may end up creating serious problems and the repercussion of such is enormous.

“The targeted students were about 300 but those in attendance today are over 250,” he said.

While encouraging the students to make effective use of the knowledge acquired, Ahmed-Chikaji charges them to be good ambassadors of their families, states and country.

He advised parents to be checking the day-to-day activities of their children most especially on social media to save them from falling into negative peer group influence.GO, Facebook, organize digital training for 250 secondary school students

Also speaking. Mr Hameedu Abu, an Educator with Safe Online and Cc Hope, Facebook, said the programme was a series of modules designed especially for teenagers aged between 14 and 17.

ALSO READ: #NoToCodeine campaign: Edo N-power charges 322 pupils on dangers of drug abuse

“It is a digital skill on how you can be safe online. Remember, the Internet came with a lot of good things, a lot of wonderful things and a lot of dangers, risks and fraud and so on.

“As teenagers who are already exposed to the Internet, it will be important for them to get to know how to guide themselves against such stress.

“At the end of the day, we want the students to live with the skills that are necessary for them to be able to stay safe online and be able to know how to set their private settings on Facebook and how to create and maintain secure passwords.

“They should also be able to know more about public wifi and how to stay safe when connecting to wifi or how to avoid them,” he noted.

He assured that the programme was very relevant to their studies in view of the fact that everything nowadays was online, including assignments given to students in schools.

Earlier, Mr Abdullahi Suleiman, one of the teachers in the college appreciated the organizers for what he described as a  wonderful initiative that would not only benefit the students but also their teachers.

“This is an avenue to learn new things and students are quite enlightened about it, I want this to be a constant event.

“Though we have been teaching them computer sciences and some kind of things related to this, this workshop is like more of exposure to them because they have learnt things that probably they are not opportune to learn in normal classroom settings.

“Of course, the training exposed them to the internet, internet security use and other things that are very important,” Suleiman said