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What You’ll Learn
As technology evolves, so do the challenges kids face while navigating the internet. CTC’s Jenn Wilson-Kolesar shares how her telco created a children’s book, “Cyber Tech Critters,” to engage kids and instill online safety lessons.
Guest Speaker
Jen Wilson-Kolesar
Show Notes
Transcripts are lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Intro: StoryConnect, a Pioneer Podcast helps you discover ideas to shape your stories and connect with your community. Love this episode? Follow StoryConnect on your favorite podcast platform and YouTube so you don't miss your next great idea.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Cyber Tech Critters: how to champion online safety through storytelling. That's what we're going to be talking about on this episode of StoryConnect, A Pioneer Podcast. Hi, I'm your host, Megan McKoy-Noe, one of the storytellers at Pioneer Utility Resources, and I am joined by Jen Wilson-Kolesar. She's the brand manager at CTC, a telco serving communities in central Minnesota, and then partnering with other utilities to offer internet access across the state, which is pretty darn cool, I think. Jen, thank you so much for joining us today.
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: Thanks for having me. We're excited to be here.
Megan McKoy-Noe: This is exciting for me because we were talking about this earlier. I see you at conferences, and we're always like waving and stuff. And when I saw you last fall at a conference, you were showing off something pretty cool to a couple other folks there, and I, like barged in and said, let me see what you're doing because it was so cool. And for folks watching on YouTube, it is this amazing children's book called Cyber Tech Critters, and it's for online safety. And I was blown away because I hadn't seen any other folks doing this yet. I've seen some electric co-op folks doing things like this, but not something for broadband, which I thought was really cool. And I'm wondering, just break this down for us a little bit. Where did the idea come from to write a kids' book about being safe online?
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: Yeah, so it's been a fun process over the last year or so kind of working on this. Our marketing team is like a very creative group and fun. And we've always kind of talked about the idea of doing something that related to cybersecurity for kids, a book. But I think what really kind of sparked the idea, and I was talking with Jackie, who authored the book that you met at StoryConnect, but really gained traction at the 2025 StoryConnect when Patrick Wood with his book. He shared that, and we just really, like found a lot of inspiration that kind of really kind of kicked off that idea of like, you know what, this would be a really good opportunity, a way to like get in front of the community, get in front of children with an idea of how to keep kids safe online. So that's kind of how it originally started. And then yeah, so that was the beginning of it. And so we started slowly rolling it, like a slow roll of brainstorming and then, yeah.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Nice. Well, you know how to make my heart happy mentioning idea at StoryConnect then sparked something else. It's the whole reason we have that conference. So I love that this started from something you heard there, and then you took it and turned it into your own. I loved reading this, and my daughter read it with me. She had a lot of fun. Your setting for the book is in Connect Wood where four animal friends are playing together. There's a fox, a rabbit, a turtle and a squirrel. This crazy squirrel named Scammy. And he gets into trouble when a stranger keeps offering him free acorns, which I feel I relate to a little bit when I'm hungry. How did you decide what type of critters children could relate to?
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: Yeah. So I'm going to go ahead and give Jackie Evanson, who wrote this book, like the credit here. Credit where credit's due. She is just wonderful. But she, you know, I think she really kind of took to heart. She has a young daughter and just understanding, looking at how kids interact with other children's books. And, you know, we wanted to find things that were, you know, felt familiar to kids, something that was a little symbolic. And so when you look at these characters, they have, you know, each bring kind of like a natural personality that kids can align with. So like Fiber the Fox, he's a little clever. You know, you have Scammy the Squirrel who's a little curious, a little too impulsive, you know. And then from more of a kids aren't going to recognize this, but maybe the adults do. And a way to kind of tie it to CTC is, is we really wanted to tie in some like internet broadband, you know, references in there. So it's Fiber the fox is his name. And we have Routy the Rabbit. And, so it just kind of adding some little, you know, Connect Wood, the name of the town, you know, just really wanted to embed some of broadband themes throughout. Subtle, kids may not recognize it, but we know.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, you know, and then I think I looked at the title Cyber Tech Critters, and it was like CTC, that's a nice little Easter egg right in there. Makes so much sense. So I love the work that Jackie did on this. You also the illustrations. There is a story there, right, with Bryce Killian?
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: Yes. Bryce. So we had the opportunity to have an intern last summer, Bryce. He came in. When we interviewed him, we kind of talked about, you know, the different projects he's worked on in school, different stuff like that. And, you know, we kind of threw out the idea of like, you know, we might want to do a children's book this summer. Is that something you would feel comfortable illustrating? And he, you know, very polite, very said like, yeah, I definitely would. You know, and we kind of ended it there. Internship started, and I had Bryce working on some digital ads and some, you know, social media posts. And, you know, really wanted to get them exposed to like every, give them a good internship where he could, you know, touch multiple different projects.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Yeah.
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: But really, I think what helped kind of kick this and move this forward is we started noticing post-it notes on his desk of characters like illustrations. And it was like, he's interested. Like he's ready to go. And so that's when we really started moving forward with getting the book written so he could start illustration. And he truly has a passion and a gift for illustration. So, it's just attention to detail and how much his heart went into this book. It just really, it was really awesome to see him kind of just dive, dive right in.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, I love it. I love that you had the right people in place at the right time to make the idea a reality. It's always the dream that folks have for all that to line up, right? So you have this book. Now what do you hope kids take away from this?
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: Yeah. So I mean, I think looking at it as taking away is, is looking at making sure kids – it's bringing awareness around safety online. And really getting kids to stop and think, you know, before they click on something or before they react. To understand that the world, the internet, is an amazing tool, but there's also some not great things happening as well. So making sure that they're aware and how to stay safe there. So if they're able to look at everything, you know that to know that not everything that's free, and that's offered as free and fun, is always safe. Another thing we really hope is like for them to know that it's okay to ask an adult, you know, is this, you know. And then to trust their instincts on what they're clicking on. You know, if the kids can walk away with one of those things, I feel like this is a success.
Megan McKoy-Noe: I love that. I mean, again, no one's going to offer you free acorns for a year. Like that's just not, it's not a reality. And you know, if you're a squirrel, you got to stand back for a minute, listen to your friends and not immediately click the button.
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: I think too, you know, I was talking with Jackie about this and we're just understanding that the internet's a different world than when we grew up. You know, her daughter is three years old and can navigate her phone just so well. And she knows what the YouTube button is. Or she knows, you know, and so it's really ingraining in kids at a young age, you know, internet safety and knowing that like three year old Jenn is very different from her three. You know, we really need to look at it from, you know, the perspective and meet kids where they're at today. And so that's kind of, you know, one of the big things, big takeaways, of this book.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, I love the idea for the book. I love how you got the idea and how you made it your own. And I think a lot of other folks are like, "Oh, this could be fun." But let's talk about how you made it a reality. You had the writer, you had the illustrator. But what kind of time and budget did it take to create the draft and then get it published?
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: Yes. So when I looked at time wise, it took Jackie about a week to go through and write, edit, kind of do some different revisions. Of course, we used a little bit of AI to help with brainstorming on things, as we all do. It's a very awesome tool to help with. I love it for brainstorming, and so we used some of that there to help with that. So it took her about a week from start to finish to like knowing that we're like, it's a go. We have an illustrator ready. So that was about a week. And then Bryce, I think really started moving forward with concepts of illustration styles and character development. And he was a part time intern. And so from July to the beginning of August, he worked on this book. About 20 hours a week, give or take, because we had them still working on some other projects. So we, you know, we wanted to make sure he had a well-rounded internship, not just focused on one thing. So the majority of the budget, I would say goes to illustration, just because it takes longer than you think. And if you want to get a specific style down. Bryce also really, he really dove into this too with looking at it from an ADA perspective. He really paid a really close attention to the color palette he used, making sure that it was ADA compliant for kids with like colorblindness, so the contrast was there. He really paid attention to details. So I very much, you know, wanted to give him that time and space to do that so.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Well and normally, like we hear a lot of illustrators come through with our little indie book shop, and they'll talk about the time it takes to write a book or illustrate a book, and it's a lot longer. So it's still amazing that even paying like spending time to focus on the details. I love that he focused on making sure that all kids could see this and enjoy and access these lessons. I think that's huge. But still, I mean, that's not that long of a time.
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: No. And we were on a time crunch. You know, his internship was ending in, you know, early September. So we wanted to make sure we had – this wasn't a type of project where I felt like somebody else could pick pick it up, you know, mid-illustration.
Megan McKoy-Noe: It's his style, definitely.
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: It's his, you know styles I really wanted, you know, him to be able to finish it. I worked on getting it aligned for print. And then, we're starting out small with it too. We ordered 100 copies to start with, and then we just ordered a second 100 maybe two months ago as well. So it's a kind of a slow ramp as we're, you know, kind of rolling it out, just in the chance that we needed to make some edits. We didn't want to order 500 and then have.
Megan McKoy-Noe: So speaking to that, you're ordering small batches of it, which is smart. How are you rolling it out to the community?
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: Yeah, it's a great question. So we started out in January with a couple just smaller social posts of, hey, check this out. You know, as more of an awareness that we did this. We hadn't put them up for sale yet. We hadn't got them out necessarily to the community. We waited til March, which is National Readers Month, I believe.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Timing is everything.
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: Yes. And so, we decided to kind of use that as our launching spot. And so what we're doing is, we started out with kind of an internal program of, if anybody, any employee wanted a copy of the book to bring to the school, to their child or grandchild's school to read it, we would donate a copy to that school. And so that was kind of one of the ways we were getting it out there. We've posted on social media. They're for sale in our lobbies. All proceeds go to our CTC Cares, which is CTC's nonprofit. And so we really wanted to like find a way to leverage it in multiple ways. So not just, I mean, we have the cybersecurity awareness, but, you know, might as well make it benefit CTC Cares as well. So, all profits go there. And then we do are working on a kind of a bigger plan too, we have a new community engagement employee who is kind of starting to, is going to be building relationships within the community. And we're going to, this will be a really good tool for her. So we're still working on rolling, getting complete rollout and figuring out what we want to do with it. But and getting it out there. But so far, I mean, we've moved through quite a few copies. I don't have a total at the moment, but we are, yeah, we're excited to get it out there.
Megan McKoy-Noe: So it's always great to have another tool that you can use, especially if you have another community engagement person on your staff. I mean, to be able to equip them with this book automatically gives them a leg up, which is really helpful, I think. I know you've been rolling it out slowly, but how has it been received by the community? Have you heard any feedback so far?
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: Yeah, so far it's been good. We've gotten good feedback. People have enjoyed the stories. They found it relatable. The kids have enjoyed it. So far, so good.
Megan McKoy-Noe: And then you said something pretty darn cool. If a listener loves this idea too, and they want to use your story in the community, how can they do that?
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: Yeah. At this point, we don't have it online for sale, but they can go ahead and reach out directly to us at marketing@goctc.com, and we can get a book mailed out. So they can purchase through that way. We can go those routes. We are, you know, starting to brainstorm ideas too how to collaborate with other cooperatives with getting.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Which y'all are really good at.
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: So we're still in that brainstorming phase. So more, more to come on that on maybe some more customized options. But at this point, if they are interested in getting some copies, just reach out to marketin@goctc.com and.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Love it.
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: We can hook you up.
Megan McKoy-Noe: And I've got a couple copies that you sent me that I'm going to bring to StoryConnect in 2027 that folks can see in the real there, which is always fun. So one last question before I let you go so you can chase the squirrel and again, explain that nuts are not always free. You've got to work for your food. But if a utility is trying to reach kids in a new way, what is the number one thing that you would recommend?
Jenn Wilson-Kolesar: Oh, that's a great question. Honestly, I would say it's meeting kids where they're at these days. You know, meeting them with a story, meeting them with visuals. You know, not a lecture, not a lecture on cybersecurity. They're not going to respond well to that. I don't have kids, but I know that. So I think it's trying to find ways to meet them where they're at is my biggest recommendation. And I feel like books are a great way to do that.
Megan McKoy-Noe: I love that, and I agree. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story with utility pioneers. She is Jenn Wilson-Kolesar from CTC. And I'm your host, Megan McKoy-Noe from Pioneer Utility Resources. And until we talk again, keep telling your story.
Outro: StorycCnnect is a production of Pioneer Utility Resources. Send questions to hello@pioneer.com and learn more about our member-owned marketing agency at pioneer.coop.