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In this era where digital technologies have reshaped nearly every aspect of our lives, it is crucial to cultivate more than technical skills to navigate the digital world. As UNESCO states, education that emphasises competencies and values that encourage responsible, critical, and ethical digital citizenship is essential for global peace. Transforming this vision into reality is what inspired Erasmus+ project Power-Up: Values at the heart of digital citizenship.

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Power-Up Report

  1. Expand our understanding and innovate how children, caregivers, and educators learn about the importance and application of character development and virtues in the digital world.
  2. Develop resources that empower caregivers and educators to foster children’s digital citizenship through a positive framework rooted in virtues and care.
  3. Cultivate approaches that empower children with a sense of global responsibility, recognising digital technologies as a meaningful tool for seeing the world as one interconnected whole.
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To learn more about our journey and outcomes, check out the following report!
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Our Framework

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The digital world holds extraordinary promise for expanding human connection, sharing knowledge, and building communities grounded in dignity, justice, and care. Yet this same space presents complex challenges, from misinformation and overconsumption to fragmented connections and the erosion of trust. Power-Up recognises that digital education must reach beyond technical proficiency or age-based safety guidelines. Instead, it seeks to nurture the values-led capacities individuals need to navigate and help shape digital spaces with wisdom, integrity, and hope. Rather than defining digital citizenship merely as risk avoidance, Power-Up envisions the digital realm as a space of profound human potential and collective progress.

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By integrating insights from academic research alongside the experiences of children, teachers, and caregivers, we have developed a framework that defines four interconnected key areas of focus. Each key area addresses personal, relational, and civic dimensions operationalised as themes that facilitate a deeper exploration of specific topics, virtues, and concepts related to digital citizenship. The framework centres on cultivating capacities that enable individuals not only to navigate digital spaces safely but to contribute actively to the betterment of society and the unfolding of a just and unified world.

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More information
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For Schools

Building on the framework, Power-Up developed a suite of educational materials designed to translate the framework into practical tools that teachers and students can use to reflect and learn about these topics.
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Educational Materials
(Lesson Plans & Thinking Cards)

One of these resources is a set of lesson plans designed to prompt teachers and students to reflect and share insights related to each theme and key area. Reach out to us for the full lesson plans! graphic-dotted-square
Key Area 1

Discernment begins with the courage to question. This theme nurtures curiosity as a core habit, encouraging individuals to look beyond appearances and explore the origins, purposes, and trustworthiness of the information they encounter. It invites a posture of inquiry and reflection, recognising that digital content comes from diverse sources and carries different intentions and perspectives. By actively questioning where information comes from, who created it, and for what purpose, individuals cultivate habits of critical thinking and purposeful engagement. It fosters practical strategies for evaluating digital content, helping individuals develop personal approaches for assessing usefulness and trustworthiness.

Digital citizens live in an environment where algorithms profoundly shape what we see and how we understand the world. This theme cultivates awareness that digital experiences are curated by invisible systems that filter, prioritise, and amplify content based on programmed criteria. It helps individuals recognise that access to information is not neutral and that algorithms can both broaden and limit perspectives. This theme encourages individuals to question which voices or views might be missing from their digital environment and to reflect on how algorithmic curation can reinforce bias or create echo chambers. By building awareness and agency, individuals learn to navigate these systems in ways that align with their values, actively seeking diverse perspectives and engaging in ethical digital practices.

Discernment ultimately serves not only personal understanding but the collective good. This theme highlights the significant influence of digital spaces on societal unity and trust. It explores how a lack of discernment can contribute to polarisation, misinformation, and erosion of community cohesion, while applied discernment helps foster environments where honesty, integrity, and hope can thrive. This theme calls individuals to recognise their collective responsibility in maintaining truthful, trustworthy digital spaces. It invites reflection on how digital infrastructures and content shape perceptions and behaviours, encouraging digital citizens to act with wisdom and protect spaces where respectful dialogue and shared understanding can flourish.

Key Area 2

This theme emphasises the importance of moderation and intentionality in digital habits. It explores how individuals can reflect on the purpose behind their technology use, recognising both the benefits and risks to their physical, emotional, and mental well-being. It calls for cultivating self-awareness, discipline, and the capabilities to align digital habits with higher personal and collective aims.

Our well-being is intimately linked with that of others, especially in shared digital spaces. This theme highlights how every digital action — what we share, how we engage, whose voices we amplify — shapes the collective environment. It nurtures an understanding of respect, inclusion, and relational sensitivity as essential components of digital citizenship, helping individuals ensure that their digital behaviours contribute to communities where trust, dignity, and belonging flourish.

This theme explores the transformative possibilities of digital technologies when used with intention and hope. It encourages individuals to see themselves as agents of change, capable of leveraging digital tools to raise awareness, mobilise communities, and inspire action for social good. It nurtures skills for envisioning and initiating digital projects that contribute to justice, sustainability, and collective well-being.

Key Area 3

This theme explores how digital technologies shape the way we express and interpret meaning. It nurtures clarity, intentionality, and empathy in digital communication, helping individuals choose words, tone, timing, and platforms in ways that promote understanding, trust, and respect. It empowers individuals to approach digital conversations as opportunities to build bridges rather than create divides.

Beyond individual exchanges, this theme focuses on cultivating relationships that endure and grow. It explores qualities such as trust, kindness, and mutual respect, helping individuals reflect on how their digital interactions either strengthen or weaken meaningful connections. It equips individuals with strategies for fostering authentic bonds, ensuring digital spaces support relationships grounded in dignity and mutual care.

Communities, digital, physical, or hybrid, thrive when members feel a sense of belonging, purpose, and unity. This theme examines how digital tools can be harnessed to build inclusive, resilient communities that honour diversity and collective well-being. It encourages individuals to contribute actively to shaping spaces where meaningful connections and the oneness of humanity become lived realities.

Key Area 4

This theme explores how digital footprints are created through intentional choices and unintentional traces. It nurtures awareness of how personal data and online actions form lasting records, influencing how individuals are perceived and how algorithms shape their digital experiences. It empowers individuals to act consciously, balancing privacy with authenticity, and aligning their digital trail with their values.

An online presence extends beyond profiles and posts; it is an expression of identity and values. This theme encourages individuals to reflect on how their digital presence represents them, influences relationships, and contributes to the broader digital culture. It invites individuals to shape their presence purposefully, ensuring it fosters respect, inclusion, and meaningful engagement.

Digital spaces transcend national borders, offering unprecedented opportunities for global connection and shared action. This theme explores how individuals, as both digital and global citizens, can engage in ways that promote justice, unity, and collective well-being. It calls individuals to recognise their power to shape global narratives and relationships through thoughtful digital engagement, building a world that honours the dignity of all.

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For Families

Practising responsible, safe, and healthy digital citizenship is something that must be taught, reflected on, and learned—both at school and at home. That’s why we also aim to support families in exploring and using our framework. To help with this, we invite you to use our set of conversation cards to spark meaningful discussions at home. graphic-wawe-circle
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Facilitation Materials for Parents

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Setting the Foundation with Picture Books:

When exploring how to raise responsible digital citizens, we quickly realised that the journey doesn’t start with technology, it starts much earlier. Long before children enter the digital world, they begin to form the values, habits, and ways of thinking that will shape how they engage with others, online and off.

These picture books were co-created to help children aged 3–5 develop essential early understandings, like considering others’ needs and recognising the interdependence of our world. These values may seem simple, but they’re deeply connected to how children will one day act, connect, and contribute in digital spaces. Each book includes a guide for parents and educational pages that highlight how these early concepts support future digital citizenship and global awareness.

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To find and order the books
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Creative Outputs: graphic-square

Another valuable resource developed is the collection of student digital creations that explored concepts and themes of the framework through animations and music. These creative outputs provide engaging entry points for exploring digital citizenship themes, allowing young people to see their own experiences and voices reflected in the materials.These creative digital outputs are useful resources to share in classrooms and other educational settings to aid other students and educators to explore the concepts being presented, and provide engaging examples that inspire reflection and action.

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Throughout the project, students and alumni at Brilliant Stars explored concepts surrounding digital citizenship and created poems and lyrics exploring responsible digital citizenship, that they then put to music and performed.

About Us

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Brilliant Stars International School

Brilliant Stars International School is a values-driven school committed to nurturing the whole child. With character building at the heart of its approach, the school supports the social, emotional, intellectual, and moral development of each student. As part of an international community, families, educators, and children work in close partnership to create a learning environment grounded in care, reflection, and responsibility. The school aims to empower students to grow into analytical thinkers, ethically grounded leaders, and compassionate, engaged global citizens.

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Dexterity Club

Dexterity Club is an EdTech organisation based in The Hague, Netherlands with the mission to offer innovative resources, aimed at children, parents, and educators, that encourage active and responsible participation in the digital transformation, with special emphasis on those affected by the digital divide. They create innovative learning experiences to help young people, their families, and educators explore the digital world and build critical, creative, and responsible digital skills.

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PowerUp Team

Co-funded by Erasmus+, Power-Up is the result of a meaningful collaboration between Dexterity Club and Brilliant Stars International School. United by a shared commitment to digital citizenship, the two teams collaborated to explore how values and virtues can guide young people toward responsible, ethical, and balanced use of digital technologies. A partnership dedicated to reimagining digital citizenship education, not as a checklist of rules or risks, but as a values-based journey toward more respectful, ethical, and empowered digital lives.

Core Team: 
Co-Founder & Project Manager - Nura Jahanpour
Co-Founder & Dexterity Club Lead - Dina Fajardo Tovar
Research & Programme Assistant - Gwendolyn Blaga Philbrow 

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