As regular readers of my blog know, I am passionate about the development of digital creativity skills whether that be for staff or students, digital creativity skills are of key importance as we progress in our career or as the students move into whichever field of work they choose. They will need to have an understanding of how to create infographics, social media posts or presentations, reports, or in some cases be able to create videos. In short, students will need to be confident in creating digital content. That is where sites such as Visme come in it is a web-based graphics creator in ..read more

Recently Google announced that they would be retiring Jamboard, so in this blog post, I thought I would discuss some alternative tools that you can use in its place. Firstly, Jamboard for those not familiar with it is a collaborative platform, that was part of Google productivity tools that provides users with a canvas that they can collaborate on. The user could add Sticky notes, Images, Text boxes, and Shapes as well as draw freehand with this being done in real-time with all contributors being able to see what others are adding. I have to confess that Jamboard has been my go-to tool for re ..read more

In this month's blog post, I thought I would revisit the topic of video, now I’ve covered this topic before when I focused on how you could use video with your students and you can read that post here. However this time I am going to focus on video production and how I go about creating my videos. I can’t believe I’ve now been actively recording and sharing videos for YouTube for just over six years and in that time I’ve amassed almost 1,000,000 views. What started initially as a New Year’s resolution has ended up being something that I’ve just kept on going with. The need to find content for ..read more

Following my previous blog post in which I explored whether AI was a good or bad thing for educators I was approached to write an article for FE week's The Staffroom column in which I review ChatGPT and ask can it help reduce teacher workload. You can read the article here https://youtu.be/ZL5Zuar-l7Q ..read more

In this month's blog post I am going to explore some of my approaches to student feedback and motivation. Just like my most recent previous posts the theme is the same as this months #TeamsEDUchat that takes place on Twitter today 17th May at 3pm UK time to join just search #TeamsEDUchat. As teachers we know the importance of providing students with good constructive feedback that helps them to develop and understand how they can improve their work as they progress through their course of study. Before I go on to explore some of my approaches to providing feedback I thought I would touch on s ..read more

In this month's blog post I explore my approaches to hybrid learning. My reason for choosing this topic, Was partly as I'm currently having to deliver hybrid lessons, it however is also this month's ,TweetMeet topic. So what is hybrid learning? For me, ‘Hybrid learning’ is when you have some of your students connecting to your class remotely from home and the remainder of your students being in the classroom with you. This is not to be confused with ‘Flipped learning’ where you would share online resources and activities that students are expected to engage with or complete before arriving in ..read more

Firstly, apologies for the bigger gap than I had anticipated between posts, despite my best intentions I have struggled to time to write. However I am excited to be back and writing again. If you've read some of my previous blog posts you will know that I'm passionate about the development of digital skills of both teachers and students. As the past couple of years has highlighted, regardless of which field of work your students are going to progress onto they will need to have well developed digital skills. In turn as teachers we know how effective modelling the behaviour we want to see in o ..read more

As teachers, we are all aware of the importance of checking students learning. There are a number of benefits the first of which is it allows us to see what students remember and understand. This can help to inform your planning for subsequent lessons allowing you to revise what you are doing if you feel students need more or less time on a particular topic. Another benefit is it can provide students with a sense of achievement if they can see they are making progress which is great for their motivation and engagement. There is a wealth of tools out there that will help you check your student ..read more

At this time of year (End of May) in Further Education we would be typically looking forward to the return of students and the starting of the Summer term. Working with and supporting them as they finish off assignments and prepare for final end point assessments. It is also the time that teaching staff look to the new academic year and start the process of planning schemes of learning for September. However with the uncertainty surrounding covid-19 it looks like we will need to maintain some aspect of social distancing and this will have a huge impact on what the new academic year could look ..read more

With the new academic year about to start, as a teacher, we start to think about how to best onboard and induct our students. In this blog post, I explore the importance of setting high expectations not just related to behavior but also to the way you want them to use technology to create their assignment and coursework. Just because your students appear confident in using their mobile devices with certain apps it does not mean that the same confidence also applies to using productivity tools such as Google apps suite and Microsoft office. So it is key that you introduce the tools you want th ..read more