The reality of 'downsizing'

I have been in my new post now for five months having moved from a large FE and HE College to a small Sixth Form College overseen by the two local High Schools. There have been a few changes that I'm having to get used to.


Resource and service provision
The first thing that I became aware of was how service provision can greatly differ depending on where a student chooses to study their A Levels. If they choose to go to an FE College (like Kingston) they could have access to copies of their course textbooks and recommended reading, e-books and e-textbooks, a range of journals and journal databases, subscription online resources aimed at 16-19 year-olds, general interest materials, research skills inductions and the support of professional librarians. If they choose to go to a small Sixth Form College (like us), or continue at their High School, financial restrictions mean that the same level of provision simply isn't possible.


Knowing what students at Kingston were able to access I have been trying to introduce new services here. Whilst I am unable to subscribe to large journal databases, such as JSTOR or General OneFile, I am currently trying to encourage our English department to have a look at Literary Reference Center. The subscription cost is much more manageable and I know that our English Literature students are required to search for recent criticism on the texts they are studying. Whilst small, this database would at least provide them with access to appropriate material and give them an idea of how the type of database they might use if they go on to Higher Education could work.


One of the most useful resources for our students is the collection of Philip Allan Review titles. We currently subscribe to seven. Due to the discounts we would receive through our local consortium I could subscribe to the Philip Allan Online Archive and have access to all fourteen titles for less cost. However, the Archive does not include the current years' issues and so I would have to continue the print subscriptions as well to ensure that students continued to receive articles related to their current topics. Therefore, some subjects will continue to miss out on this excellent resource. Unfortunately I am just not in a position to be able to provide a useful online resource, accessible from home that supports the majority of students.


We have subscriptions (managed outside the Library budget) to five subject areas in Kerboodle and four of these provide an e-textbook. However, I am unable to provide any further e-book provision and the amount I have available to spend on print books is very limited. I recently did a little splurge as we're coming to the end of the financial year but could only include 11 titles - still very exciting when they arrived!



I am also trying to promote my services as a professional librarian. One of the key aims of the College is to produce independent learners and I am in a key position to help achieve this. Having gained positive feedback in my student library questionnaire I have begun to offer a bookable one-to-one service for students who would like help with finding high-quality resources or referencing their work (a requirement for those who choose to take the EPQ). This has not been picked up yet but it's still early days. In conjunction with this I am also promoting the induction service I can offer to tutors whereby I can come into their class and deliver a session on research skills or using our online resources. Again, uptake for this has been slow but I have begun to have discussions with staff in some subject areas and I plan to get myself into some departmental meetings in the summer term to try and build inductions into next year's course delivery.


Perceptions of the Librarian and the Library
One of the features of our College is that a lot of our teaching staff come over from the two local High Schools. Understandably, they are used to the service of a school library and the role of a school librarian. Beyond providing a traditional library service this usually involves a focus on literacy and reader development, not research and independent learning. The biggest challenge I'm facing, therefore, is to change the perception of the Library as a College-wide service and the role I can play in that. It was admitted to me on interviewing for this role that the College hasn't had a qualified librarian in post for a long time. Whilst this is not necessarily a negative thing it has meant that the Library hasn't gained a reputation for being a central College service for research and enquiry support. I believe this is one of the causes for the slow up-take in classroom inductions. At A Level, students need to be able to supplement their work with high-quality sources and know how to effectively search and deal with the amount of information they can access online. I am determined to work to place the Library at the heart of this College in terms of research support and make sure that every student has access to the research skills support that I can offer and, over time, prove the impact that the Library can have on students' results, despite the limited budget!


With all this in mind I have to say I don't regret the move at all. Even with these challenges, on a personal level, it's a great opportunity as I can work to improve resources and services, ground them into course delivery and then be able to say that I have achieved this, all on my own.

Student Views - running the Library Questionnaire

During two weeks at the end of November I ran the first of a new, annual Library Questionnaire with our students. At the moment our students don't really engage with the Library beyond using it as a study space. Few resources are borrowed, very few information enquiries are made and there is little course integration, for example through resource lists or inductions. The purpose of my questionnaire, therefore, was to gauge awareness, gain opinion and collate data that I could use with teaching staff and College management to help drive forward improvements. I also included a couple of questions supplied by COLRIC (Council for Learning Resources in Colleges) so that I can benchmark myself against other institutions.


My experience of questionnaire planning, delivery and analysis with the LRC team in my previous post had prepared me well for going it alone. So what had I learnt?

• Each question must have relevance. It might be you want to find out something specific you can't get from your other statistic gathering. It might be you need to obtain some evidence to include in a review or proposal. Or you might want to use it to help raise awareness of a resource/service which then provides year-on-year data demonstrating your promotional success (or lack of!). Either way, if you cannot specify exactly how you will use the results then it is not a relevant or useful question.
  
• Don't ask about something you can't change. If you know that there is no
  
  budget/space for new computers in the immediate future, for example, don't ask students whether they think there are enough. Instead, ask them whether they can always access one and then you can look at introducing or changing booking allowances. What's the point of asking if you can't do anything about it?
  
• Encourage negative comments. It's great to know if you're doing things well but in order to make effective improvements you need to find out what your students aren't happy with. When applying an agreement scale to a question, for example, start with Strongly Disagree. That way students have to think about whether there is anything they're not happy about before they reach the options to agree.
  
• Encourage details and give provision for follow-up. If you ask whether students want new resources it's not very helpful if you get an anonymous response asking for "more resources for biology". (Particularly if you have biology courses at several different levels.) Unfortunately, I was unable to go through my questionnaire with students as they completed it, encouraging further details, and so left myself open to ambiguous responses like this. It is therefore important to ask for more information about the student themselves (aside from any institutional equal opportunities monitoring), e.g. which course they are studying and what year they are in. This then allows you to follow up with subject tutors to find out about topics and resource requirements in that area.
  
• Analyse your respondent demographic. As well as identifying trends across the questions as a whole it is also interesting to analyse your responses at a deeper level, looking at who your students are and how they responded to other questions. For example, are there response groupings, i.e. several responses of the same type coming from the same year group or course? This could then help you identify priorities in resource provision or promotion without the need being specifically requested in other parts of the questionnaire.

I have completed my first phase of analysis, identified the 'headline' results and drawn up an action plan. Despite planning well I did encounter some issues.


I had to leave students to their own devices to complete the questionnaire. The Library is

a silent study environment so I couldn't go through the questions with students. There are two other study areas in the College and I regularly replenished questionnaires there to increase responses. However, because I am a team of one, I was unable to spend a lot of time in these areas talking to students. The benefit of this is that students feel they can be more honest. However, this means that in future years I won't be able to guarantee a certain number of responses. Furthermore, I found that not all questionnaires were completed the whole way through and some respondents didn't take it very seriously. (I feel confident that the requests for me to change the Library into a spaceship, install a wood burner and swimming pool and introduce a trolley service I can safely ignore!)

To encourage responses I also created an online version using Survey Monkey and this raised issues of its own. Firstly, due to the limitations governing the number of questions you can have in the free part of Survey Monkey, some questions had to be arranged slightly differently and this may have affected the responses. More worryingly, despite setting the majority of questions as requiring an answer there were still several instances of questions being skipped. In spite of these issues I received 208 questionnaires back (121 paper and 87 online) - almost half of our student population - and so received enough full responses to make the results meaningful.


Having developed an action plan the final stage is to let your students know what you are doing. You asked them for their opinions so it is only right that you tell them what their contributions have resulted in. Inspired by my previous College's method I put together a 'You Said, We Did' announcement. I posted this on our website and social media and emailed a copy to all students. To encourage engagement it is important that your users know their input is valued.


For next year's questionnaire I will:

• Sort out the issue with Survey Monkey.
• Try and reduce the number of questions (this year I am implementing several new services which I wanted to gauge interest in. The number of questions - 16 - may also have been why some students failed to complete the questionnaire).
• Possibly spend some time with students in the other study areas to go through the questionnaire with them and develop conversations.

 

A Period of Change

I have been out of social media in a professional context for a while. My last Tweet and blog post were both in July 2014! There have been a couple of reasons for this. During the first year we saw significant changes with regards to staffing in the LRC team which meant that I just didn't have the time to monitor my Twitter feed or compile new blog posts. Then, in the summer of 2015, I got a new job in a Sixth Form College and my husband and I relocated from Surrey to Norfolk! There were a number of reasons for the move but it's one I have no regrets about. Part of the reason it has taken another six months for me to get back into social media is that I am responsible for the College's Twitter presence. In my head that meant I - MUST - HAVE - THE - COLLEGE - TWITTER - ACCOUNT - OPEN - ALL - THE - TIME! I've now come to the realisation that, actually, I can alternate between the two during the day - what a revelation!


So, let me tell you about my new job. I am the Educational Resource Manager / Communications Officer at Dereham Sixth Form College in Norfolk. We are a small College - our current cohort is just over 430 students across Years 12 and 13 - and offer a number of A Levels, Applied A Levels and few BTECs including the BTEC Extended Diploma in Sport through DESA - the Dereham Education and Soccer Academy. We also offer the EPQ (Extended Project Qualification). I started just before the students returned in September and so have now completed my first term ... ... and I'm loving it!


As you'll see from my job title my role is divided into two areas. As Educational Resource Manager (still really excited about having the word Manager in my job title!) I am responsible for running the Library and its services. I am a team of one and so I man the enquiry desk for the majority of the day but also have the freedom to run and manage the service as I want. I am the first qualified librarian that the College has had in a long while and so there are many things I have been developing and implementing already (more on that later). As Communications Officer I oversee and maintain all publicity and communications from the College through parent emails, our website and its news area, Twitter and Facebook, the College newsletter and media relations. That sounds like a lot to try and be dealing with but, when your Library is a silent study space and your students are impeccably well-behaved (compared to previous experiences) my days are filled and stress-free.

My Library



There have, of course, been some changes it's taken a little while to get used to. In my old post I was part of a team of LRC staff comprising qualified librarians, graduate trainees and part-time assistants. Here, as I mentioned, I am a team of one. Dereham Sixth Form College is run with a small team of fixed, College-based staff, then further teachers come over from our two main feeder High Schools (which also jointly manage the Sixth Form) to assist with the teaching. Despite spending a lot of my day without much contact with other staff, I have never felt alienated from our core College team. They are all very friendly and have made me feel extremely welcome.


The other main change I'm dealing with is a change in organisation identity. Kingston College is an FE and HE College and so is run independently. Dereham Sixth Form College is run and managed by the two High Schools in Dereham, along with the management staff from the core College team. This means that we are not independent and we are not an FE College. I have a significantly smaller budget and therefore cannot afford the number of resources that A Level students at a larger FE College can access. In some cases, we are not entitled to access certain resources, such as the free Ebooks for FE collection through JISC, for example. The move has really highlighted to me the continuing difference in resource provision, and therefore levels of service, that an A Level student can receive depending on where they choose to study.


During my first term I have been getting to know the College systems and processes, the students, and the resources in the Library. I have also been implementing a number of changes and new developments:

• The book stock is grouped by subject but has no classification system. I have begun a long-term project to classify the book stock with the Dewey Decimal System in conjunction with liaising with relevant teachers to complete an effective weed of each subject area.
• I have inherited an old, no-longer-supported version of the Library Management System Eclipse. This has developed a number of bugs and is far more suited to a school library's collection than a Sixth Form. Furthermore, the online catalogue interface decided to give up long ago! I have put forward a business case to change our LMS to Heritage (which I used in my last post and IT have previously had experience of) and the College Director has given the go ahead.
• Before Christmas I ran the first of a new, annual Library Questionnaire. My experience of helping to run a yearly questionnaire at Kingston fully prepared me so that I felt confident in the types of questions I wanted to ask, how to manage the questionnaire and how to deal with the responses and develop an action plan for responding to the feedback.
• I am in the process of trying to get teachers on board so that I can develop and deliver a set of research skills inductions focusing on using our Online Resources, developing research skills and finding high quality resources and referencing. Furthermore, I am about to offer bookable one-to-one sessions for students on research skills and referencing.
• Due to the timing of my start date the College Director was kind and didn't involve me with the new student induction programme. However, I am now in a position where I can develop an effective welcome induction to the Library along with some new Library cards (these were disbanded when Eclipse stopped reading the barcodes but, since the College does not issue ID cards to students, I want to re-introduce them to help me learn names quicker rather than having to ask all the time!)
• I have significantly developed our Twitter account and our relations with the local press. This term I also created the first issue of our new College newsletter, The Sixth Former.
• IT Support and I are combining my design skills and their coding skills to create a brand new, in-house College website. As part of my interview for this role I was asked to be prepared for a discussion on how I would develop and update the website so I already wanted to make changes in terms of re-defining our audience, re-organising content and improving accessibility. Now, we're getting to build one completely from scratch which is very exciting (rather than being limited to the format of our current site without incurring large re-design costs from our hosting company).

In addition, I have found myself working in a number of new areas. The College offers a range of enrichment activities and the Director suggested I take on some student library volunteers and be involved in running a book club. I now have one regular volunteer who comes to me once a week and is currently helping me overhaul the careers collection. I want to make her experience valuable so I'm making sure that each task I give her, whether it be collection management or cataloguing new journals, outlines clear, transferable skills that she can develop for the future. I've never been involved in a book club before - I found that analysing texts during my English Literature A Level put me off doing the same when reading for pleasure! We chose a couple of books to read between the group over the Christmas break (I've read The hundred year-old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared by Jonas Jonasson) and we have out first meeting this week. I'm leading the discussion of this book with the Director leading the discussion of the other title (Seeing stars by Simon Armitage). It will be interesting to see how I do! In my Communications Officer role I have found myself contacting a local business asking for support to raise sponsorship money for our Half Marathon Team, getting in touch with an exhibition space about the possibility of exhibiting A Level artwork and regularly working as a press officer at our events.

I have also found myself dressing up as a witch for Halloween, in spots and stripes for Children in Need and in a Christmas jumper for Text Santa!

 

 The change in post for me has meant a number of adjustments - a change in work duties and focus; a decrease in salary; an increase in accountability and responsibilities; a decrease in stress. All have been changes for the better, however, and I feel that I have seamlessly fitted into my role and College life. As one colleague said, "It feels as if you've been here for years!" All in all my first term has been full, varied and great fun!

JISC E-Factor 2014: It's all about learning and teaching

Last week I went to the JISC E-Factor conference. This year was my fourth in a row (as well as presenting 2 years ago) and as usual it didn't disappoint. The E-Factor is an opportunity for organisations across the country to come and showcase their examples of best practice using e-learning. It doesn't matter how big or small the project - you can always learn something new. The official site for this year's E-Factor is here (I will also be linking to sections of the site below.)

The day is divided so that there are twenty 20-25 minute showcases in total across two rooms. This does mean that you have to choose which showcases you want to watch but ten still leaves plenty of variety! There is also an exhibition from a number of e-learning and technology suppliers.

The first showcase I saw was delivered by Martin Compton from Ealing, Hammersmith & West London College. I was impressed that 150 tutors had completed his e-teaching course! I'm also interested at having a look at Blendspace - an online tool that allows you to neatly collate a range of resources on one 'canvas'.

Next I quickly swapped rooms and went to hear Angela Rideau from Barnet and Southgate College talk about how they have developed their quality standards for Moodle course pages and, along side it, an online CPD course for tutors to enable them to have the confidence to develop their course to bronze, silver and gold standards. The lack of consistency across the quality of Moodle courses is something I have noticed in my role supporting its use and I'll be interested to see how our College deals with the issue.

The last showcase before the tea break was delivered by Sue Withers and Andrew Moller from Havering College of Further and Higher Education. I liked the vision they displayed through their imaginative use of Wikis as a) a place to store links to students' digital portfolios and details of HE interviews b) a central place to collate feedback for each student for every module of the course and c) a central place for each student to store their formal writing (such as personal statements). Particularly with the last use it removes the difficulties of keeping up to date with versions of documents and means that work can't be lost or forgotten!

Some of Andrew Checkley's tips from Croydon College about enhancing teaching and learning included having a starter activity right at the beginning of the session; using Bloom's taxonomy to help structure content; using Moodle's forum; using Moodle's auto-linking function from the glossary tool; and including self-assessments. I'll be looking into the glossary and auto-linking tools.

Tanu Varma from Westminster Adult Education Service gave some really positive messages about how you shouldn't feel limited by the absence or limited availability of technology when looking at e-learning. She gave some great examples of how this has been developed in her service.

The last session I saw before lunch was delivered by Danielle Watts and Bilal Bobat from Barking & Dagenham College. I particularly liked how, using two of their students, they practically demonstrated the benefits of Google hangouts and Google Docs.

After lunch Adam Blackwood from JISC RSC South East gave a very entertaining presentation demonstrating the extent to which mobile technology (in literal terms, as opposed to just mobile phones) has developed and is around us. I loved the fact that he had a QR tie! The main theme of his session was gamification and I liked some of the ideas he demonstrated to make learning more engaging.

Next I swapped rooms quickly again and went to see Simon Gale from Orchard Hill College. I particularly liked how they had used such as tools, blogs and discussion groups which not only made information more accessible to their students but in helping to create them develops their communication skills.

I've recently been working with a member of staff to develop a Functional Skills page in Moodle for the College. The next showcase I saw was delivered by Daniel Blaszczyk from West Thames College. It was interesting to see the approach they had taken in creating and delivering content for this area.

The final showcase of the day was a very inspiring one. It was delivered by Angela Rideau and a number of students from Barnet and Southgate College. Here, they have created a dedicated 'Digidesk', staffed voluntarily by students, where both students and staff can go for help with e-learning tools and technologies. I think this is a brilliant service. Not only do the students running the service benefit by developing a range of skills, it means support is always available and raises the profile of e-learning across the College.

A few years ago we made some significant developments with e-learning technologies in the LRC using Xerte (which we still regularly use for creating interactive learning packages), XtraNormal (cartoon-making service), Windows MovieMake (to create enhanced podcasts) and Jing (screen capture tools). I delivered my own showcase demonstrating how they could be used in an LRC setting. Since then, however, and due to a number of factors, we haven't really pushed this further. I'm keen now to see how we can expand our knowledge and support in this area and develop our services and the role of e-learning within the College.

My second HUG

On Thursday 6th March I attended my second HUG (Heritage User Group) meeting. The Heritage User Group is a community of users of the Library Management System Heritage who work closely with, but independently from, Heritage's developers, IS Oxford. You can find out more about the group here.

The morning's presentation was delivered by Neville Jones from IS Oxford who demonstrated the new developments within their Cirqa system. We still haven't yet upgraded to Heritage Cirqa (although should be soon) but I was glad to see that some of the previously frustrating aspects had been improved (such as the past inability to renew all items in one go). I was also impressed by the improved clarity of reader messages when managing their account online.

The afternoon began with a brief AGM and were followed by two presentations by members of the committee. Emily Armstrong and Julian Dawson demonstrated their use of Heritage's 'favourites' listing feature to create reading lists. We have been using this feature for a number of years so I didnt' really learn anything new. The second presentation on tidying up your data I found much more useful. Whilst I look after a lot of Heritage's 'housekeeping' tasks there are areas of our system which I haven't really looked at. Following the meeting I am keen to start looking at our authority files for keywords, for example, and tidying them up as well as checking for duplicate names and titles.

The only negative aspect I found was that Neville was around for the entire day in order to field a Q & A session. Whilst the Group is independent from IS Oxford I felt that the structure of this meeting left little room for questions and good practice sharing amongst colleagues.

I wrote the following to conclude my blog about my first HUG meeting and I stand by it still:

         "Overall I found the day extremely useful and would recommend that anyone who uses Heritage become a member of the Group. You have access to a range of helpful resources and advice and the opportunity to discuss with others their experience of Heritage. Of course, this isn't the only Heritage forum environment - there is the Marvin mailing list and the HUG sub-groups. However, for very little membership cost there are big benefits."

Weeding Project

(Orla Kierly garden spade &
fork from amantidirect.co.uk)

Over the 2013 summer break LRC staff undertook a weeding project in response to student feedback claiming that they didn't have access to up-to-date resources. The aims of the project were to refresh the look of the shelves by withdrawing old and tatty material and to withdraw individiual print titles whose remaining presence could be detrimental to learning. Therefore, it was decided that we would focus initially on three subject areas - ICT/computing, engineering and business - with a different member of the team responsible for each. I also chose to look at removing old editions where new editions were available in stock and removing titles which supported old exam boards.

I used Heritage to identify print titles which hadn't been borrowed along with titles with edition numbers and, in conjunction with the College prospectus, titles which supported old exam boards. Within the three subject areas the following criteria were then applied when looking at each item:

• age and relevance to subject - is the information now out of date/have there been new developments?
• condition - is the item in need of repair/beyin repair?
• whether surplus to requirement - do we have unnecessary multiple copis either through non-use, being an old edition or ebook version available in stock

I applied the following rules when looking at old editions and unsupported exam boards:

• keep the most recent edition in stock and withdraw all previous editions
• if the exam board is no longer supported for that subject withdraw all titles (unless published since the most recent exam board changes in 2008-2010)

I reviewed each item selected for withdrawal as my job role gives me a more overall perspctive of our collections. However, I 'rescued' less than 10 titles. Our Front of House team then began the withdrawal process, deleting each title from Heritage and applying the appropriate withdrawn stamps. The items were then boxed up for collection by Better World Books.

Reflections:
This has been a new project for me as I have not been involved in a large weeding project before. As a result, there have been a few areas in which I have revised my initial approach.

• I was too harsh when withdrawing old editions and we agreed that in future we should keep the previous edition. This is in line with university practices.
• After some initial deletion had taken place by the Front of House team we decided that it would be wise to compile a list of withdrawn titles for auditing purposes. A hand-written list was compiled of the items already deleted from Heritage and this was then initially continued to record further items. However, a suggestion from within the team prompted an important time-saving change. The new process now involves changing the status of the item to 'withdrawn'. A report can then be run listing these items before they are deleted in one go on Heritage. This has helped speed up sections of the withdrawal process and provides a more accurate list of withdrawn items.
• Overall timescale: whilst we initially agreed that we wanted all items to be withdrawn off the floor and moved to the staff area by the start of term, there has not been a final deadline for the withdrawing process. This has meant that the project is actually still ongoing. It has also meant that I have had to produce the report and run the global delete mentioned above early in order for our OPAC to give an accurate reflection of stock (all items set to withdrawn are then hidden from view on the OPAC resulting in some titles displaying with no accessions). In future, the latter end of the project needs to be managed more closely to ensure that it doesn't drag on.

The next stage for me is to revew the comments made by the team with regards to their recommendations for collection development. I shall also be working with another colleague to plan the next stage and area of focus.

"It's all about ... Motivation" - JISC RSC London's e-Factor 2013

Yesterday I attended JISC RSC London's conference e-Factor 2013. Held annually e-Factor is based around a different them each year and brings together educational institutions to showcase their work in learning and teaching with technology. This year's theme was: "It's all about ... Motivation". This was my third time attending and I found it an inspiring as ever. Twenty showcases ran throughout the day - two showcases ran in unison in separate rooms - and there were exhibitions from a number of suppliers who were on hand during the breaks to give demonstrations of their products. (For full details and the report visit the e-Factor 2013 site here.) The day also offered plenty of opportunity for networking. Therefore, I do recommend planning in advance what you want to see so that you get the most out of the day. Last year I presented by own showcase (click here for my blog post of the experience) - this meant I wasn't really playing attention to the showcases before mine! This year though I was attending entirely as an observer so, with my itinerary in hand and iPod charged (search for #efactor2013 on Twitter), I went prepared to be fully inspired and motivated.

Following the initial registration, refreshments and welcome from Graciano de Santana Soares (JISC RSC London Regional Manager) it was straight into the first showcase with Newham FE College. Newham spoke about how they use Adobe Captivate to create podcasts and assessment-based learning packages on employability skills for engineering students. I thought these were a really good way of enhancing learning outside the classroom and securing assessment whilst keeping the content engaging.

Next, Barry Spencer from Bromley College demonstrated his use of augmented reality. I didn't even know what augmented reality was so, if you're in the same boat as me, it basically means taking a physical object and enhancing it with online materials. Barry gave an example of how, using the Aurasma app, students can scan 'trigger images' using the smartphone or tablet and open additional content. I thought this was a really clever use of technology and, unlike a written web link or QR code you can make the trigger interactive and visually appealing.

The following showcase really interested me. West Thames College spoke about how they have developed two awards to support student progression. The Employability Award and the Research Skills Award are delivered online as learning packages. I think it is brilliant to offer a dedicated programme in which students (and even staff!) can actively develop their skills and provide evidence on their CVs. My interest was in the Research Skills Award so, in the break that followed, I tracked down one of the delegates from the LRC to learn more. During the break I also visited the stand run by Xtensis who were exhibiting their product XtLearn.net. Xtlearn allows you to combine a range of resources in a very visually appealing way along with the ability to link to the collection from Moodle. I thought this might be a good way of resolving the scrolling issue when uploading lots of resources to Moodle.

After the break the next showcase I saw was from JGA Group. They explained how they have started to use Moodle and other e-learning tools, such as videos, podcasts and e-portfolios, to support their work-based learners. It was good to see that the use of e-learning has expanded beyond the FE/HE sector into private sector training too.

Next, Saqib Safdar from Woodhouse College delivered a great presentation demonstrating how the use of one iPad has revolutionised the way he delivers maths lessons. He wirelessly links the iPad to the projector and uses the app Doceri to turn the screen into an enhanced, interactive whiteboard. This leaves him free to move around the class. It has also given his students more confidence as they can put their work on screen using DocSan and explain and amend it without having to stand in front of the group. Often when we think of iPad projects it involves giving iPads to the students, but this showcase demonstrated how much of an effect giving just one iPad to the teacher can have.

The last showcase I saw before lunch was from Barking & Dagenham College who have revived the use of netbooks, and Chromebooks, with students. Loading only a simple operating system and promoting GoogleDocs (for access to word processing, etc) keeps running speeds high and allows students to be flexible with their learning. Their LDD department also highlighted how their students struggle with their VLE's built-in ILP and have solved the problem by creating and sharing their own on GoogleDocs.

During the lunch break I visited the stand run by PlanetPC who were demonstrating their product PlaneteStream. Their product enables you to create your own video archive, including programmes broadcast on Freeview channels, and I was interested in how they are then able to add details of the content into your library management system.

I began the afternoon listening to a great presentation by Bernadette John from King's College London. She spoke about digital professionalism and how important it is for students to be aware of their digital presence and the impact it can have on their employability, particularly within her field of healthcare. Bernadette and King's College have taken a proactive lead and developed their own social networking site for students in which they can discuss real-world examples of digital profiles along with an annual e-learning course embedded into Moodle. Similarly with West Thames College I like the fact that King's College are not only providing the information but are helping to ensure that students fully take it in.

Next City Lit spoke about how they have implemented blended learning and flipped learning with their PTTLS and PGCE courses. I was interested in flipped learning as I wasn't really aware of what it involved. I found out that in a flipped learning environment the students use a variety of resources to learn about the main concepts at home, prior to the lesson. Then, in class, the teacher can focus on anything the students wish to clarify and also extension activities and learning that would have typically been set as homework. Khorshed, who presented, also brought with her one of the students from the PGCE course and it was good to hear about it directly from a student perspective. City of Westminster College followed on the same theme of flipped learning. This time it had been applied to motor vehicle groups. John Doherty, a motor vehicle tutor, explained how he had seen nothing but a positive impact on his students resulting in them being more engaged and confident within the class.

The final showcase of my day was delivered jointly by Ealing, Hammersmith & West London College and Waltham Forest College. The presented their 'eTeaching' course. This is an online course aimed at teachers which looks at "developing free resources using easy web based tools to enhance teaching and learning". Along with using a range of tools such as presentation tools, video tools, blogs and animations staff also have the chance to discuss the pedagogy of e-learning and e-safety. I thought this was a brilliant CPD opportunity for teachers as not only are they expanding their knowledge but they're creating engaging and exciting materials and resources they can use in their lessons.

The conference ended with reflections by Cathy Walsh, CEO/Principal at Barking & Dagenham College who raised a point that I agree with - the day was really well attended with over 200 names on the delegate list covering a range of posts. However, in order to ensure that these examples of best practice are spread across institutions, and not just residing in small pockets, more individuals from senior management need to attend and see what is going on.

As always I had a great day and have taken away lots of inspiration which I will pass on to my own team.