Youth Panel YouTube“feed”

28.11.2017

Give the youth a possibility to be creative and you’d be amazed what they can come up with!

Information Technology Foundation for Education (HITSA) won the resource competition organized by European Commission, with the project called “Youth Panel YouTube “feed””. The project took place from March to November 2017 and the main idea was to support an interactive online collaboration between three countries’ (Austria, Lithuania and Estonia) youth panel members to create a pan-European YouTube channel, where Youth Panel members upload their country-based vlogs or short videos with online communication tips; ideas on how to use the internet on their behalf, what or how they use different gadgets or smart technology in their everyday life (for example, Raspberry Pi as a home-security set up, etc.).

In cooperation with Youth Panel coordinators the exact timeline and activities were put in place. Filmmaking was divided into three stages: preproduction, production and post-production. ITFE took two Finnish experts (Akseli Virtanen and Erkka Lehto) on board, who created three learning videos and Padlet boards to help and guide the youth through the filmmaking process. Facebook page was used as a main communication platform.
As a result, 21 videos were uploaded on to the YouTube channel called “Smartly on the web”: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZsxqkZT62iqCvfd9qYoD8w. All the videos are either in English or with the English subtitles.
Akseli Virtanen, Video Content Producer in Yousician Oy (edu-tech company teaching playing music through software), was working as one of the filmmaking experts in the project, commented: “It was a pleasure to be involved in this important project. Making the tutorial videos was fun and very rewarding. I have only a little previous experience in teaching, getting back to it was great.The youth received our tutorial videos and educational materials very well and I’m very excited about the results. The quality of the youths’ work far exceeded my expectations. The videos are full of creative thinking, exciting storylines and great technical solutions. I was especially pleased to see how many of the works were truly original in terms of the story.As the topic of the course and the youths’ videos was rather difficult – ’safety on the internet’ – we thought that the youth will have some trouble creating interesting stories. I could not have been more wrong. Seems like the topic touches their lives strongly and the project truly inspired them. Watching all the videos was a great learning experience for me too. A look into youths’ lives and problems.Privacy and online bullying were the most popular topics of videos. I hope many people get to see these works and that we will raise awareness about these problems especially among adults. The world has changed a lot and growing up in this digital, fast-changing world is far more difficult than adults generally think.
I want to thank HITSA for organizing such a project. The impact of the project in terms of educational value was noticeable immediately and will only grow over time while people get to see the videos.“

To acknowledge the youth for the good work, three best videos were selected.
First place and the title “Best video” (decided by the experts) went to the Estonian video called „Internet Safety“, authors Georg Šumailov and Robert Pärnpuu.

This video showed outstanding work and thinking “outside the box”, creativity, technical quality and storytelling. Experts especially liked how the common digital troublemaker – the virus – had taken a relatively human form in the video and put into the “villain” role. Authors of the video managed to keep audience engaged by humor in order to tell a story with an important message – very well done! The team showed some real commitment and obviously put a lot of effort into the making. Thank you! We hope to see many more films from you in the future!

Second place and the title “Special Mention” (voted by the coordinators) went to the Lithuanian video called “Think Before You Post”, authors Arnas Kajokas, Gabija Kurkulytė, Gabrielė Didrikaitė, Lukas Vrubliauskas, Veronika Šumilova.

This video represents the topic where every youngster will get experience at one point: finding a spouse or a job. It puts our lives in perspective and rises important questions, like what does my online reputation do in that regard. There was a very nice approach to online reputation and to online self-representation! It is a great story supported by good camera work.

Third place and the title “Youth favorite” (voted by the youth) went to the Estonian video called “The Hacker”, authors Jasmin Saar, Getter Lauk, Astrid Uus, Egle Oolberg, Mihkel Karus.

This video presents an important topic of preserving valuable and compromising data in your computer and good knowledge about what can be restored from your devices. Video was very well thought through – the script, storyline and technical solution make it complete and interesting to follow to the very end. In the video you can see really professional camera work, where all the angles are thoroughly prepared.

The Austrian youth were given a special mention for contributing so much important content to the project. Videos “Cyber-mobbing”, “Right on your own picture” and “Self image” were also strongly mentioned throughout the voting.

Robert Pärnpuu and Georg Šumailov, authors of the best video concluded that in order to make an excellent video, you should enjoy the process yourself and then the results will be nice to see for others as well: “Coming up with the ideas was one of the hardest parts of the process, we had a huge amount of ideas that were scrapped, even some of which we had worked on for a longer time than we are willing to admit. The most important thing we learned during the whole production, was that you need to have fun, as when we first took it much more seriously, we ended up with something that missed character and we were never proud of. And because we’re both very tech savvy, we didn’t want to portray internet safety as something boring and obnoxious, rather as interesting keeping the informative parts present.”

HITSA especially wants to thank all the coordinators participating in the project: Matthias Jax from Austria, Gertha Teidla-Kinitsõn and Margit Laidvee from Estonia, Jūratė Drazdauskienė from Lithuania.

Search for “Smartly on the Web” on Youtube and join us, learning about safety on the internet!

Project was financed by the European Commission.

Links to the materials: