Like all staff at FE institutions across the country, teachers at Gloucestershire College are keen to make use of cutting-edge technology to enhance their students’ learning experience. Accordingly, the college has assembled a tech-savvy panel of experts to assess and give feedback on the latest apps and ed tech in order to encourage innovative practice among its teachers.
These experts were not brought in from Google or Microsoft, however. Instead, the college focused on people much closer to home with a unique perspective on effective learning: the students themselves.
A pilot of Gloucestershire College’s Student Innovators project was started in 2014. Since then, it has been rolled out across its departments. The college reports that it has resulted in greater engagement from learners, who have been given more freedom to innovate and drive best practice at the college.
Power to students
Next week, participants from the college will be speaking at Jisc Digifest to explain what lessons from the project could be passed on to other institutions.
The network has grown over the past three years, says Catherine Hartell, creator of the Student Innovators project, primarily because students have had the chance to make a difference to the way that their classes - and their college - is run.
The scheme works by students independently researching and reviewing apps. They then publish their feedback in the form of a blog. Apps that do particularly well become the college’s “App of the week”, and details are then published on the college’s virtual learning environment, and included in all staff emails.
“We’ve tried all sorts of different apps - the good, the bad and the ugly,” says Hartell. “We review them all and put them on a blog to document what apps the students have used.”
The Gloucestershire College project will be showcased at the Jisc Digifest, which runs from 14-15 March at the ICC in Birmingham. TES is media partner for the event.
This is an edited version of an article in the 10 March edition of TES. Subscribers can read the full story here. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here. TES magazine is available at all good newsagents.
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