Runway Training

“I work with 16–24-year-olds on a programme called a Traineeship, which bridges the gap between education and employment/apprenticeships/further education. The Traineeship consists of L2 Digital Promotion for Business, L2 Functional Skills in Maths and English (if needed), L1 Award in Business Enterprise Skills and Level 1 Certificate in Employability Skills.”

Caoimhe focused on upskilling students around use of online verification services and online purchasing. She also wanted to make her teaching more interactive and fun using online resources such as Padlet and Jamboard.

Additional protection for personal devices:

Caoimhe was exploring the verification part of the EDS qualification and discovered that she wasn’t 100% confident about how her students could ensure they were safe from viruses on their personal devices. She contacted one of Runway’s IT specialists and asked about what he would recommend her students to download or install onto their devices to reduce this. His response was:

“BullGuard is a good one, BitDefender is also good. Windows Defender has good function on its own. It’s more about how you use a computer, not what you download. The main thing which will protect you is deleting/blocking all emails you do not recognise. Another is making sure you ONLY download software from the developer’s website.”

Caoimhe passed on these recommendations to the students in the introductory session. Most of the students had a virus protector but were interested in these new suggestions.

Caoimhe attached links to the suggested device protectors onto the course Padlet so the students had access and could explore downloading these onto their devices.

Teaching the verification services part of the ‘Transacting’ skills area:

The requirement of the standard is that learners are able to understand the terminology and processes used for verification, including:

• password
• pin code
• security question
• facial/fingerprint recognition
• CAPTCHA.

Caoimhe found it difficult to keep her students engaged after the first topic because of the amount of information that had to be covered. She decided, on reflection, to separate the different verification processes into small bitesize sessions that could be delivered here and there within the Traineeship syllabus, ideally one or two topics a week This approach worked well and she was able to maintain the students’ attention The students enjoyed getting involved in the processes and being able to get their devices out to set up the verifications – especially setting up their own pin code and asking each other security questions. The verification topics opened up a lot of critical thinking, questioning and debate within the classroom.

For the facial/fingerprint recognition session, Caoimhe decided to set a task to debate whether facial or finger scanning is more secure.

Researching how to transact online safely:

To engage the students and encourage their communication skills, Caoimhe tasked her students with visiting three local banks to find out different ways of transacting online, the safest method, and what safety measures each bank had in place to protect their customers. The students created their own question sheets to write their answers in and organised amongst themselves who was going to ask the questions and who would write the answers down.

“The students were respectful, polite, and learnt a lot from the experience. Every student left the session knowing more about of the benefits of of using a credit card for making payments and how the bank recommends this as the safest way to make payments. I was particularly impressed with how, even the quieter students, got involved in communicating with the bank teller.”

Connie also tasked her learners with the same exercise, and it worked equally well.

Report writing:

The culmination of the previous task was to write a report. This did not work well because the learners were unsure how to produce one. Caoimhe realised that the students would have benefitted from a sample report that was relevant to their task as well as a template that they could use as a guide. Moving forward, she decided to scaffold the report writing task by creating a template for those students that needed it and starting the session by creating a poster so the learners would have facts and figures to hand as a visual to inform their report writing.

Use of Jamboard:

Caoimhe wanted to introduce more use of interactive tools into her lessons. She found the students in her face-to-face classes loved using Jamboard because it gave them a chance to write on the interactive board without having to stand up and do this in front of their peers, as they would normally have to do on the whiteboard. This made Caoimhe think about using Jamboard more often even with her face-to-face learners. Connie also tried out Jamboard instead of PowerPoint as part of her Reflective Exploration and found it engaged students and provided a good means of checking their understanding.

Connie’s Reflective Exploration was focused on her Traineeship students who started online work experience with a digital marketing expert at the beginning of their programmes. They found online work experience challenging, as some of them did not have the basic digital skills to participate effectively.

Connie felt that students would benefit from coaching in basic skills on their computers and being able to navigate Microsoft Office efficiently. This proved beneficial for the learners because they were able to grow in confidence by working at an appropriate level. Connie covered basics skills that helped her learners to:

• check if their password was strong enough
• understand the importance of a strong password
• store their information safely.

Using Canva for making media:

Connie tried switching from Squarespace to Canva to help learners to produce media for their course. She found that the lower-level learners engaged better with Canva. Traineeship students on work experience were asked to create social media posts about their Traineeship course using the Runway brand guidelines. The incentive was that the posts would be shown on Runway’s social media channels. One learner put together a Canva testimonial for her time at Runway Training as a stretch and challenge task.

Traineeship teacher Connie May describes her trial of Canva with her learners.

Connie also tried out some of the same approaches as Caoimhe (see above).

Learning points:

 Covering the requirements about verification services in the EDS unit about ‘Transacting’ can be too much for one lesson and so it is preferable to deliver these as bitesize topics embedded across the curriculum.

• Verification topics such as facial and fingerprint recognition open up opportunities for critical thinking, questioning and debate.
• One way of teaching about transacting online is to ask students to visit their local banks – where there are branches available – to ask about different ways of transacting online, the safest methods, and what safety measures the banks have in place to protect their customers
• When it comes to report writing, it can be helpful to provide a sample report that is relevant the task; a template as a guide can support learners with low level literacy skills. Asking learners to create a poster featuring facts and figures works well as an introductory task to equip learners with visual cues that they can include in their reports.
• Canva is a very useful tool for learners with lower-level digital skills to be able to produce media for their course.