Online Safety Education and Wellbeing

In the first week of term, on Thursday 29 July, we have Leanne Ross coming in to speak to our students in groups throughout the day. Leanne spoke with staff earlier in the year and opened their eyes to many aspects of the digital world, particularly in relation to how personal information is shared and stored online. 

In the Netsafe survey that we asked students to do earlier in the year, it became apparent that they had little understanding of their digital footprint so we felt it would be to their advantage to ask Leanne to come back and speak with our students. We are very fortunate that Leanne is a mother within our school so said yes to us and she is an excellent communicator so we envisage the students will learn a lot from their time with her. 

A little about Leanne:

Leanne Ross hails from Ireland and is now Director of Marketing, Sales and Communications at Otago Polytechnic. Leanne sits on the Startup Dunedin board and is also secretary of the Insert Coin To Play Trust (a technology for youth charity) based in Gore. After moving to New Zealand in 2016 Leanne was Global Marketing Lead for one of the city's game development studios, before spending 2 years teaching Digital Marketing to students at the University of Otago, where she still teaches the digital paper on their Master of Entrepreneurship programme. During her time at the uni Leanne was a liaison for schools and regularly gave social media and data safety talks to high schools across Dunedin. She is a panel judge and mentor for the Young Enterprise Scheme in Otago and organises youth technology events for both ShadowTech and TechWeek. Her son, Chē is a Year 8 at Kavanagh College.