Resources to Support Remote Working

The Education and Training Foundation (ETF) has developed a series of free, online webinars and a guide to help colleagues across the Further Education (FE) and Training sector working remotely to support students based at home. Below are links to the guide and all the latest webinar recordings on YouTube, with links to associated online modules on the Enhance Digital Teaching Platform.

The Guide to EdTech and Essential Digital Skills Training to Support Remote Working

The Guide identifies and provides links to EdTech and Essential Digital Skills training modules on the Enhance Digital Teaching Platform which can contribute to developing the knowledge, skills and understanding required for teaching and learning online.

Download the Guide Download Accessible Version of the Guide

 

Webinars to Support Remote Working

Available webinars are:

  1. Making the most of online learning.
  2. Delivering through a virtual classroom.
  3. Adapting content quickly to deliver online.
  4. Supporting learners in VLEs.
  5. Engaging learners in VLEs.
  6. Supporting learners with online reading skills.
  7. Making webinars more inclusive.
  8. Introduction to the Guide to EdTech and Essential Digital Skills Training to Support Remote Working.
  9. Supporting learners with writing skills.
  10. Enhance your powers of critical reflection.
  11. Supporting learners with low-level literacy skills remotely.
  12. Collaborative approaches to professional development: learning the lessons of lockdown.
  13. Releasing the genie – helping teachers and learners tap into the potential of students’ personal devices.

 

Webinar 1: Making the most of online learning

Hosted by Alistair McNaught and Sally Betts with Sarah Simons and Vikki Liogier

Online learning is an effective way of supporting students when attendance is disrupted. However, where online learning is implemented without knowledge or awareness of digital accessibility, it can create unintended barriers. Basic accessibility practices are vital to ensuring all students benefit from online materials.

Among the wealth of self-access training materials included on the ETF’s Enhance Digital Teaching Platform are a range of modules focused around accessibility and dealing with difference and diversity. By becoming familiar with the key ideas around digital accessibility and inclusion you significantly increase the chance of your online experiences being more effective for more students.

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Webinar 2: Delivering through a virtual classroom

Hosted by Sally Betts with Sarah Simons and Vikki Liogier

How can you make virtual classrooms work in practice? This webinar explores how tools that are commonly available in webinar software can be used to create different pedagogical approaches for online delivery.

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Webinar 3: Adapting content quickly to deliver online

Hosted by Sally Betts with Sarah Simons and Vikki Liogier

This webinar shows how you can take a class presentation (PPT) and quickly adapt it for online use, including audio, video and the use of notes to help learners access all the extra information normally given in class. It also explores how to combine tools (Nearpod with Skype/Zoom or Teams) to make structured but interactive online sessions using a presentation as a starting point.

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Webinar 4: Supporting learners in VLEs

Hosted by Sally Betts with Alistair McNaught, Sarah Simons and Vikki Liogier

How do we support learners suddenly faced with learning independently online? This webinar looks at tools that build a route through learning content and provide offline support to learners. The session uses Moodle to demonstrate features within a VLE to support online learning and looks at the use of tracking, conditional statements, glossaries and forum.

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Webinar 5: Engaging learners in VLEs

Hosted by Sally Betts with Sarah Simons and Vikki Liogier

How do we motivate and engage learners suddenly faced with learning independently online? This webinar will look at tools that can be used within a VLE help to motive and engage learners by adding collaborative activities and gamification. The session will use Moodle to demonstrate features within a VLE to support online learning. The webinar will look at the use of forums, wikis, quiz and badges.

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Webinar 6: Supporting learners with online reading skills

Hosted by Alistair McNaught and Sally Betts with Sarah Simons and Vikki Liogier

According to the National Literacy Trust, 16.4 per cent of adults in England, or 7.1 million people, can be described as having ‘very poor literacy skills’. There are multiple causes for literacy difficulties, but whatever the cause, students working in isolation via online learning are more vulnerable to discouragement and failure. However, technology offers many ways of supporting learners with their online reading skills. This session will explore these opportunities.

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Webinar 7: Making webinars more inclusive

Hosted by Alistair McNaught Sally Betts with Sarah Simons and Vikki Liogier

As more courses move online and tutors deliver more content through webinar style sessions, it becomes vital to understand both the benefits and the barriers of webinar-based lessons. The tools and platforms you have available may put constraints on how inclusive your webinar can be, but this session will explore some of the common issues and suggest ways to minimise their impact.

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Webinar 8: Introducing the Guide to Support Remote Working

Hosted by Bob Powell and Geoff Rebbeck with Barbara Nance and Sally Betts

The ETF's Enhance Digital Teaching Platform has many bite-sized modules, created to support teachers in everyday practice, which contain insight, information, advice and support for teaching and remote learning. The recently published Guide (see top of page) picks out the modules of most value for pedagogical practice in remote learning. This webinar by the Guide's authors shows you what they are, where they might fit into your teaching, learning and assessment and how to use them to best effect.

Webinar 9: Supporting learners with writing skills

Hosted by Sally Betts with Alistair McNaught and Sarah Simons supported by Barbara Nance

According to the National Literacy Trust, 16.4% of adults in England, or 7.1 million people, can be described as having 'very poor literacy skills.' At a time when our learners are working remotely, we will explore how technology can support them with writing skills as they try to complete coursework and assignments. 

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Webinar 10: Enhance your powers of critical reflection

Hosted by Tricia Odell with Alistair McNaught supported by Sarah Simons

With online teaching and learning being a new environment for many teachers, it is important to begin to understand how effectively your practice is developing. In this session we explore how collaborative critical reflection with colleagues can help you identify successes and challenges, reflect on them and develop strategies for improvement. 

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Webinar 11: Supporting learners with low-level literacy skills remotely

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Webinar 12: Collaborative approaches to professional development: learning the lessons of lockdown

Hosted by Dr Tricia Odell with Joyce Chen

An unexpected consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the realisation of the many benefits of a skilful use of technology to enrich online learning. Additionally, teachers have had a unique opportunity to spend time collaborating and reflecting with colleagues, sharing practice and developing new skills to meet these new challenges. This webinar builds on the recent ‘Enhance your powers of critical reflection’ session and explores some practical strategies that will enable teachers to prioritise this collaborative way of working as FE institutions re-open in September 2020. 

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Webinar 13: Releasing the genie – helping teachers and learners tap into the potential of students’ personal devices

Hosted by Alistair McNaught and Sally Betts supported by Barbara Nance

The most powerful educational technology you will ever use with your students does not belong to your organisation. It belongs to the students. Your student's mobile phone can support learning in a wide range of ways from personal organisation to research and referencing, reading more efficiently, writing more productively, mastery learning, collaborative learning and alternative assignments. 

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Visit the rest of the Enhance Digital Teaching Platform to discover the ETF’s full suite of fully subsidised EdTech training available for teachers and trainers in the FE and Training sector.