New City College

“I am the curriculum manager for Health and Social Care and Early Years courses. I manage 250 students, two thirds Health and Social Care and one third Early Years. Most of the provision is for 16 to 18, but we have three adult groups – two of which have ESOL learners.  My teaching background is Early Years; however, my degree was joint in IT and Education, and at a previous college I coordinated and taught on the ECDL programme. I have always enjoyed teaching basic IT skills to ESOL adult learners and have had excellent achievement rates with E3 and L1 EDS qualifications.”

Bobbi Ehsan’s presentation about her Reflective Exploration

Bobbi developed contextualised learning packs integrating EDS into her Health and Social Care and Early Years courses. Each week she introduced one of the five key digital skills areas in the national standards and related it to the vocational subject.

For example, for the Creating and Editing skills area she set the following tasks.

• ‘Your local health centre is running a workshop on the importance of handwashing. You have been asked to design an advertisement to promote the workshop and encourage parents to attend.’
  Digital skill – to create, edit and save an advert using a suitable application, including text, a table, and an image.

• ‘You are working for a local hospital. Your manager has given you last month’s admissions figures. She has asked you to present the figures in a way that makes them clearer to understand.’
  Digital skill – to create, format and save an Excel spreadsheet and chart.

For the Transacting skills area, Bobbi asked learners to research a shopping list of things for a new nursery.

For the Communicating skills area, there was a class discussion on different communication methods which led to impromptu student-led ‘show and tell’ activities sharing knowledge about security on mobile devices. Bobbi is going to include more student-led ‘show and tell’ opportunities into her schemes of work as a result.

“We explored all the communication methods and had a class discussion about what they use and prefer. Enabling discussions for this group, let the learners talk about their fears and reservations and this was a positive strategy as some had not talked about this before. This had a very positive impact on learners as they learned from each other, and some showed the other classmates some of the settings on their phone and how to protect their security. This was useful as it was a ‘show and tell’ session. Going forward, on the Scheme of Work I will certainly add ‘show and tell’ opportunities as the students learn best from each other and I wanted the session to be less teacher led and more student led.”

Across the sessions, Bobbi tried a number of learning strategies which proved effective and are included as learning points.

“I have been teaching for seven years – I taught for six years in primary schools and decided I wanted to share my passion with adults who wanted work in education, so I changed careers to become a lecturer working in a college. This is my second year, teaching on FE and HE courses in Initial Teacher Education.”

Joanna Georgiou’s presentation about her Reflective Exploration

Joanna looked at how to embed EDS into the curriculum and use it as a form of assessment. She tested this with adults studying Levels1-3 on a Supporting Teaching and Learning course. She researched 15-minute lesson starters linked to EDS qualification requirements and the lesson objectives.

An online poster made by one of the adult learners on a ‘Supporting Teaching and Learning’ course, using newly learned digital skills.
(Click to expand)

For example, for the Creating and Editing skills area, she set the following tasks.

• Create, edit and save an Excel table – asking students to investigate the data on children’s Speech, Language and Communication needs and how Covid has affected this, then asking students to formulate the data into an Excel table, showing them how to format the data in Excel with a border and bold headings and to create a formula for totalling the data.
• Create, edit and save a Word document – asking students to download a ‘flipped learning’ reading document about child development, then to copy and paste elements into a blank Word document, add a text box for their name, add a page number in the footer, add a border, and save the document for use with their assignment.

Other ideas included:

• ‘You are planning a trip for the class teacher. She has asked you to book the British Museum and to fill out the information on the checkout.’ (This task required use of fake card data)
• Students were asked to find a picture online with potential hazards in the classroom and to copy and paste this image into Word, then insert a text box and explain why there were potential risks in the photo they had chosen.

Joanna also tried using digital skills for summative assessment. For example, she asked students to create a poster to show the range of transitions that children and young people experience with explanations of how they might affect the child or young person. Students were asked to include an image, change saturation, border, alignment, text box and filled colour in their poster. Learners were proud of their achievements (example below) and the posters contributed to their final assignment.

Outcomes of trying these approaches were:

• Evident increase in self-esteem of learners as they succeeded
• Good levels of engagement
• Training of other tutors to look at their schemes of work and consider how they could incorporate digital skills in similar ways.

• Help learners to develop a positive mindset from the outset by identifying and consistently referencing the benefits of EDS for CV, job prospects, increased confidence, transferable skills, support for parenting.
• Actively encourage learners to look for examples of where EDS can and could be applied at work and home.
• Contextualise the EDS learning related to the course subject matter.
• Include lots of demos and “have a go” learning tasks.
• Model and scaffold the digital skills tasks, for example running through relevant features in Word or Excel before asking students to try for themselves.
• Allow time for students to solve problems by working independently.
• Promote peer learning by encouraging those who are more confident and tend to finish first to help those who are struggling.
• Buddy up learners for collaborative learning.
• Have a glossary of digital vocabulary on hand to help ESOL students.
• Potentially involve members of the IT team to explain some aspects such as different file formats for the Using Devices skills area.
• Prioritise the key skill ‘Being Safe and Responsible Online ‘as this can help to establish good practice for the course such as setting safe passwords.