The Education and Training Foundation (ETF) is running a series of free, online webinars to support colleagues across the Further Education (FE) and Training sector who are working from home to support students.
Further support for practitioners during Covid-19, including CPD, digital teaching support, webinars, and journals can be found on the #ETFSupportsFE webpage.
Each of the webinars listed below is now hosted, and can be viewed on the Enhance Digital Teaching Platform.
Introducing the Guide to EdTech and Essential Digital Skills training to support remote working
Hosted by Bob Powell and Geoff Rebbeck
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 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.
Supporting learners with online reading skills
Hosted by Sally Betts with Alistair McNaught, Sarah Simons and Vikki Liogier
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.’ 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.
Making webinars more inclusive
Hosted by Sally Betts with Alistair McNaught, 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.
Delivery 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 will explore how tools that are commonly available in webinar software can be used to create different pedagogical approaches for online delivery.
Adapting content quickly to deliver online
Hosted by Sally Betts with Sarah Simons and Vikki Liogier
This webinar will show how you can take a class presentation (PPT) and quickly adapt it for online use. The webinar will look at the inclusion of audio, video and the use of notes to help learners access all the extra information normally given in class. It will also explore how to combine tools (Nearpod with Skype/Zoom or Teams) to make structured but interactive online sessions using a presentation as a starting point.
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 will look at tools that build a route through learning content and provide offline support to learners. The session will use Moodle to demonstrate features within a VLE to support online learning. The webinar will look at the use of tracking, conditional statements, glossaries and forum.
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.
Making the most of online learning
Hosted by Sally Betts and Alistair McNaugh 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. This session will help viewers to be able to enable as many learners as possible to benefit from online learning.
Each webinar lasts between 45 and 60 minutes. Attendees or viewers will be pointed to free, bite-size training on the ETF’s Enhance Digital Teaching Platform to support further exploration of topics. The supporting modules enable some exploration in advance of the training. The ETF strongly advise participants to sign-up to the Enhance Digital Teaching Platform ahead of the webinars.
Hosted on the ETF’s Enhance Digital Teaching Platform, the modules support the four webinars:
Delivery through a virtual classroom, modules:
Adapting content quickly to deliver online, modules:
Supporting learners in VLEs, modules:
Engaging learners in VLEs, modules:
Visit the Enhance Digital Teaching Platform to complete the supporting modules and discover the ETF’s full suite of fully subsidised EdTech training available for teachers and trainers in the FE and Training sector.