Oldham Sixth Form College
How does technology help the college achieve its teaching and learning vision?
'There are huge advantages to using technology in the classroom, both for teachers and for children. I think there are huge advantages on a broader scale across schools and colleges for using technology for streamlining workflow, for efficiency, for savings. So there are lots of reasons that technology is really important'
Louise Astbury
Trust Director of Professional Development - Oldham Sixth Form College
EdTech and the Moral Imperative
'I feel we have a moral imperative to not just teach students their subjects, but enable them to go out into the wider world and be functioning adults in other ways as well. And there are a myriad of ways that we want to do that in terms terms of their mental health and wellbeing. But I also think we have this moral imperative beyond COVID now to not just forget about the advances we've made in using technology with students, because we we need to upskill them in technology. I think that they are digital natives is a myth. I think that they are able to use technology like TikTok very easily. But when they go out into the workplace, can they log on to a computer? Can they use things like Excel? Can they use things like Google Docs and Word Docs? Can they access the digital literacy that they need in order to avoid paying more for things? Because I think if you don't have those skills, it impacts on and can create digital poverty'
Louise Astbury
Trust Director of Professional Development - Oldham Sixth Form College
'So we've been on this journey for a long time. We've been trying to make sure that the 'caterpillar' doesn't get too long. I mean, we've always got early adopters and people that want to push forward and try lots of new things all the time. Our real challenge has been to kind of hold that back a little bit. That creativity and innovation, but just to try and get a fair playing field for all.'
Adam Smith
Curriculum Area Lead - Oldham Sixth Form College
What language can we use to share the effectiveness of EdTech?
'I think there are challenges about the evidence base with digital and I think that's probably because a lot of research studies have something else as their focus. But digital might be the way it's being delivered. So if you look on the EEF promising and projects and the toolkits, quite often digital kind of sits behind it. It's not digital that's being investigated, it's something else. So I think that's quite a challenge'
Louise Astbury
Trust Director of Professional Development - Oldham Sixth Form College
What is your ethos and values and what role does technology play?
'We've been a college that has always embraced technology. We have always embraced having enough good equipment for the students. And then in about 2016, we really started to think through much more strategically about how we would use technology in the college. So our digital learning strategy in 2017 was the first point in drawing together all the various facets of technology about the infrastructure, about the procurement, about the study spaces, about the classrooms, and about teacher professional development, making sure we had a functional VLE, because we didn't really we've never really been successful with our VLE. So that strategy really got lots of different people within the college to look at the role of technology in their area, assistive technology for SEND and that kind of thing'
Louise Astbury
Trust Director of Professional Development - Oldham Sixth Form College
How do you approach professional development?
'The way we think about professional development here is to think about it from a problem that we need to address. So we're very careful about the themes that we choose for professional development. We don't follow fads, we don't do things on a whim. We really think about what is the problem that we're trying to address. For example, our problem might be how do we enable students to remember more of what we've taught them?
So it's a problem that we want to address with students. It's not a deficit problem in staff. It's not, our staff can't do this. It's what can we do to support our staff, to support the students. And then the way we brought technology into that was to look at how we can use retrieval practise activities outside of the classroom so that we can teach students how to be independent, how to selfregulate, how to have a range of strategies to use that they can then use technology or not use technology outside of the classroom.'
Louise Astbury
Trust Director of Professional Development - Oldham Sixth Form College
How do we engage and support hard to reach schools with adopting technology?
Louise Astbury Oldham 6th Form College, discusses how she is working within the local contexts to support schools and colleges in their adoption of technology.