“Despite what some students believe, we teachers are living, breathing humans,” explains Sarah Simons in this week’s TES Further. But this bombshell doesn’t mean that you should share everything with your classes, as Ms Simons explains in her list of tips on how to retain appropriate professional boundaries - for your own safety.

Vive la revolution!

Ahead of the Jisc Digifest next week, for which TES is the official media partner, this week’s magazine contains a four-page digital learning special. Peter Kilcoyne of Heart of Worcestershire College talks about the Blended Learning Consortium, the biggest college group you may never have heard of, which is currently sweepng the country.

Paul Feldman, chief executive at Jisc, says that FE is currently facing a time of fundamental change, and that colleges and businesses ’must embrace revolution in learning’, as the consortium has done, in order to survive.

Social media superstars

Elsewhere in the issue, TES FE editor Stephen Exley celebrates the most influential social media users in further education. He asks five of FE’s top social media users how they use social media to transform the way they work, and looks ahead to the Jisc Digital Festival in Birmingham when a full list of FE’s top 50 tweeters will be published. Could you be one of them?

Time to bail

TES FE journalists Julia Belgutay and Will Martin have been busy investigating how colleges are being forced to ask for bailouts from the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) after failing to comply with the terms of their current long-term loans. Across the sector these loans represent a deficit of £1.6 billion. In his editorial, Stephen Exley writes that a way to alleviate this debt is to exploit digital learning, as the SFA are open to the idea of forgoing revenue to reward colleges who think innovatively.

FErret

Finally, Ferret has unearthed why a completely new area review could be on the cards for adult and community learning providers in London - and you can get a glimpse of a slightly sheepish-looking David Cameron brandishing the fabled apprenticeship torch (think the Olympic torch, but with added FE goodness). Check it out.

All this and much, much more in this week’s TES Further.

Read the full coverage in this week’s TES magazine, available in all good newsagents. To download the digital FE edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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