Exeter Cathedral School (ECS) was founded in 1179 as a choir school. Nowadays, the School is a co-educational day and boarding school which prides itself on being a nurturing and purposeful school for some 260 pupils. Earlier this year, after the Prime Minister’s announcement that schools across the country were required to close, the School’s management team met to prepare for remote learning for the first time in the School’s 841-year history. We agreed on a three-phase approach.

• Phase 1: Help pupils, parents and staff navigate the three remaining days of the term.
• Phase 2: Provide immediate and long-term on-site support for key worker families.
• Phase 3: Research, prepare and launch a home learning platform to allow for a longer-term closure.

As a small school, we are mindful of budgets and of the need to be able to develop and manage our remote learning platform in-house. All of our requirements led us to Microsoft and to Microsoft Teams. 16 days later, we launched our first ever virtual learning environment: ECS:Learning@Home.

8 principles to delivering a balanced approach to remote learning

Remote learning was new to us and to our pupils and families. We knew what we asked of them needed to be realistic, doable, worthwhile and stimulating. So, we established eight founding principles that would underpin ECS:Learning@Home.

Meaningful and manageable

We worked hard to set up programmes that allowed uncomplicated access to our curriculum across the age groups. We ensured that our online learning was rich, purposeful and clear.

Enriching

School is about much more than classroom learning. Through our home learning programme we were able to come together as a school for assemblies, form times, quizzes, sports days, guest speakers, Speech Day and more. This allowed us to add the important touches to a child’s day ‘at school’ and to create space for pupils to be recognised for their work and have fun with their peers.

Rigorous, balanced and flexible

We attach great importance to a broad and balanced school experience andwanted to make sure that our ‘real life’ breadth of opportunity and high standards continued to be offered remotely.

Equally, a one-size-fits-all approach was clearly not going to be good enough – each family’s circumstances were different. So we empowered pupils and parents to access our full daily offerings as they saw fit and to build in screen-free time to their routines.

Interaction

Interaction is absolutely fundamental for effective learning and teaching – and of course for first-rate pastoral care. We wanted to use a digital platform that could replicate, as closely as possible, a classroom experience. We were determined to be live, interactive, and reactive to pupils’ needs while online. Teams allowed us to do this and to achieve a coherent model of home learning and pastoral care across the school.

Creativity

And as a school which has its foundations in performance, music and spirituality, we wanted to continue to be a shining light for creativity. As well as daily wellbeing sessions run by our sports department, visual and performing arts featured heavily in our programme. Each afternoon our Creativity Hub opened up and gave our pupils access to lessons and activities in music, art and design and storytelling. We even launched ECS:Choristers@Home to keep our core strands of Choristership alive.

A day in the life of a pupil in remote learning

We streamlined the timetable so that busy families could easily keep track of the daily pattern. Every pupil started their day with live ‘morning welcome’ sessions with their form teacher and friends. This was the backbone of our online pastoral provision and allowed us to continue to be a school where people matter.

Supporting staff, parents and families

Staff training was integral to the success of remote learning. We ran training events to allow teachers to learn about Teams and provided time to practise in designated Training Huddles. All of this was, of course, done remotely! We also provided parents with a weekly evening training session.

We sent out a weekly ECS:Learning@Home update, complete with videos and snippets from the week, and – crucially – a ‘You Said, We Did’ feature: this gave parents and pupils a voice, and helped us to unify our efforts and build a cohesive home-school community committed to improvement.

Pupil and staff outcomes in remote learning

Using Teams allowed us to keep doing what we love – coming together each day as a school community. We genuinely stayed connected and, in amongst all of the learning, had a whole lot of fun!

As a staff body we held games and quizzes, kept the banter flowing through Teams chat, and even had a lipsync battle with senior pupils. Teams also meant that our pupils were able to take their public exams. In fact, the class of 2020 equalled the School’s best-ever public exam results.

The success of our ECS:Learning@Home programme seems to have resonated locally and more widely. We currently have more enquiries than ever before from families who want to explore an ECS place for their child.

How remote learning impacts our future plans

We have now adopted a blended-learning approach to our curriculum with the support of Teams, using it to further pupils’ independent learning skills. Live speakers are now joining us for assemblies and Enrichment Talks via Teams to speak about topical issues and our Pupil Voice initiative continues to thrive digitally.

We see our blended learning approach being integral to our provision over the coming months and years – it’s here to stay.

Find out more

Discover more about ECS’s journey

Get started with hybrid learning

Learn about remote learning

About the author

James Featherstone is the Headmaster of Exeter Cathedral School. His job is to lead and manage the School, look after the team of staff, and to make sure that the 260 pupils and their families have the best possible educational journey. Before joining ECS, James was on the Senior Leadership Team at the Perse School in Cambridge.

Outside of school James enjoys singing, travelling through France (he’s a linguist by training), and doing his best to keep up with his two children on their adventures together.

The post How to deliver a balanced approach to remote learning appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

More than ever, students are now accessing and engaging with learning through their own mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets. One of the main benefits of using podcasts, are that they don’t require the consumer of the content to be viewing a screen. This can often prove both flexible and convenient, particularly as the files can be listened to in a variety of settings – e.g. while out exercising, or even when relaxing in the evening.

So, the concept sounds great – but how do you actually create a podcast? This blog will take you through some key steps to creating your very first podcast, using many tools available within the Microsoft Office 365 suite.

1) Planning the content for the podcast

Before starting to record a podcast, there are some key factors to consider:

• • Who are the intended listeners?
  • How might they be accessing the content?
  • Are you recording ‘solo’, or wanting to capture a conversation with multiple participants?
  • What recording setup do you currently have?
  • Are you likely to require any further equipment?

Addressing these points will help ensure that you are prepared to record your first podcast.

2) Recording the podcast

The main hardware requirement for getting started with podcasting, would be either a smart phone, tablet, laptop or PC with a built-in microphone. A dedicated external microphone will likely enhance the quality of audio, but is not essential to the recording process. A set of earphones or headphones can also be useful for blocking out unwanted background noise during the recording process.

If you are simply looking to record ‘solo’, then you can use the Voice Recorder app built into Windows 10. This provides basic recording and editing features, and is one of the simplest ways of capturing audio content. Most modern mobile devices also come with their own built-in app, which will have a similar level of functionality.

However, if your aim is to capture a conversation between multiple participants e.g. between a host and several guests, then Microsoft Teams can offer a suitable solution.

Firstly, you will need to arrange a Microsoft Teams meeting to host the conversation, and then invite in any other participants. Once in the Teams meeting, you can select Start Recording by clicking ‘…’, which will begin recording any audio and video being shared by the participants. Once finished, you can follow a similar process to Stop Recording.

Although you are not likely to need any visuals for an audio podcast, it can be useful to have cameras switched on as a visual aid throughout the recording process. This really helps with making a virtual conversation feel much more natural – as participants can often benefit from seeing body language and visual cues.

3) Editing the content

It’s not always essential to edit a podcast. However, you may wish to tidy up your recording before publishing. If using Voice Recorder, this is possible within the application itself.

If you have recorded within a Microsoft Teams meeting, you can use the Trim video function within Microsoft Stream. If you want to retain the video captured within the podcast, then sharing as part of a Microsoft Stream channel (within your organisation), may prove a suitable option.

If you are wanting to extract just the audio from your recording (to be hosted elsewhere), or wish to do some additional editing, such as adding background music or adding an intro/outro – this will likely require the use of audio editing software. You could check with your organisation to see what software you might already have available to you. Audacity is a free open-source alternative, which provides plenty of functionality for anyone looking to get started with audio editing.

4) Hosting the final podcast

Once you have recorded and edited your podcast, your next consideration is where to host it. There are many ways that you can host a podcast online. One way of doing this via your Office 365 account, would be to use Microsoft Sway. Sway is described as Microsoft’s digital storytelling tool, and allows great flexibility to embed different types of multimedia content – including audio. Here are a few simple steps to get started with your podcast in Microsoft Sway:

1. 1. Select Create New
   2. Source a suitable image to use as cover art, and Insert as an Image Card
   3. Set the image Emphasis, as appropriate
   4. Create an Audio Card, and upload the relevant audio file
   5. Add any additional info (episode no., topic, guests etc) into the Caption box
   6. Use the Group function to link both the Image and Audio

These steps can easily be repeated to add further podcast episodes within the same Sway.

Using the Styles option within Design, will also allow you to customise the way that your Sway looks and feels. Selecting the Slides navigation mode often provides a clear and simple way of navigating between individual podcast episodes.

The Play button will provide a preview of how your Sway looks, and once you are happy, you can click the Share button to obtain a shareable weblink. This can very easily be embedded within a Team, using the Website option when adding a new tab to a channel.

Putting the steps into practice

Our DigiLearn podcast might give you a bit of inspiration to support you on your own journey to creating and sharing podcasts with your students.

Below is a quote from Nicky Varley – an MIE Expert and Lecturer in Children’s Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire, who has started exploring the use of podcasts within her teaching.

“The podcast was recorded via Microsoft Teams and then uploaded to our Virtual Learning Environment for the students to listen to. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and they appreciated that we could share our stories within the podcast – something the students said they had really missed from the classroom. The trouble with no longer being face to face, is you miss that interaction with students, and sometimes online teaching can feel a little cold. Within nursing, sharing our past experiences really helps to paint a picture for our students. This is something I know I have really struggled to recreate with other forms of technology, but now podcasting seems to have changed that. By using this approach, not only are we being inclusive, we are also being creative.”

There are many different approaches to creating and hosting podcasts utilising many of the tools within Office 365, and we would encourage you to share any of your own innovative approaches with the wider #MicrosoftEDU community.

Find out more

How to use Voice Recorder

Recording a meeting in Teams

Create channels in Microsoft Stream

Digital storytelling with Microsoft Sway

Recording a podcast for accessible learning

About the author

Chris is a Senior Learning Technologist at the University of Central Lancashire, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Since 2018, he has led development of UCLan’s innovative and sector-endorsed DigiLearn model and programme – to support, recognise and reward colleagues in relation to their inclusive and innovative digital practice. Widening collaboration across the sector, Chris also co-ordinates UCLan’s DigiLearn Sector – an active community, connecting over 1000 digital practitioners across HE, FE, schools, and beyond. As a Microsoft Learning Consultant, he now works with other institutions – supporting their adoption of Microsoft technologies to improve both staff and student outcomes. Chris also makes regular appearances presenting at both national and international education conferences. You can follow him on Twitter @ChrisLearnTech.

The post New ways of learning: 4 steps to record and share a podcast with your students appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.