Digital Skills Training for Educators

Free training that may help educators in all settings improve their digital skills whether this is for using Google Classroom with your students or Zoom with colleagues.

Google’s Range of Training

Teach from Home is a temporary information hub, collecting together training and advice on a variety of Google’s tools and resources for teachers including Google Classroom and YouTube Learning Hub (a channel collating lots of video resources). Courses on ‘Teach from Home’ include a tutorial and then a link to open the relevant tool to have a go. Examples include:

Further training resources can be found on their Grow with Google page which does link through to the Google’s Teacher Centre. The training in the teacher centre can lead to being able to qualify as a Google Certified Educator Level 1 or Level 2.

Google’s Applied Digital Skills resource contains 250+ hours of content for teachers to use with students to teach digital skills or can be used by teachers to upskill themselves. Designed for all levels of ability to use.

Finally another teaching resource designed by Google which can also be used by teachers to explore computer science – Code with Google.

Microsoft’s Education Centre

This resource allows you to learn how to use Microsoft Technology in your classroom in effective and engaging ways. You can explore ideas, resources and lesson plans. You can track your own learner journey through badges and points; you can also share your training transcript with others. Find out more here.

Office 365

Whether you want to learn the basics of office apps such as Excel or Word or work smarter, after learning new tips and tricks, the Office 365 Training Center offers a range of training for you to access for free. There is also an Office 365 Teacher Academy where educators can learn how to become more innovative with cloud-based tools, regardless of the device they use and learn how to use basic features of Office 365 including Microsoft Teams, OneNote, Sway, Microsoft Forms, Office Online and OneDrive.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams are offering a free version of Teams that lifts restrictions on how many users can be part of a team and allows users to schedule video calls, conferences, chat, share files and access 3^rd party integrations.

Video training on how to use Microsoft Teams can be accessed here.

The iDEA Award

Not just for young people, the iDEA Award is available for adults of all abilities to complete. The Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award (iDEA) is described as an international programme that helps you develop digital, enterprise and employability skills for free. You complete a series of online challenges and collect badges when successful. Each badge has points and 250 points gets you your Bronze Award, an industry-recognised award. Read more about it here.

There is a whole range of badges available to do for your Bronze Award. These are just a few.

BT Skills for Tomorrow

A free online resource to learn digital skills for daily life, for work life, for business. Click here to find out more.

Future Learn

From learning to code and exploring programming to understanding cyber security, take online IT and coding courses to explore tech trends like data science and digital marketing. Join beginner to advanced level courses led by leading tech experts. For more information click here. Alternatively there is a wide range of other programmes focused on teaching, business and management or health care and medicine.

Lynda.com

Lynda – LinkedIn Learning – a wide range of over 4000+ courses including over 600 software development courses. (Free 30 day trial at present).

Zoom

Zoom have multiple resources to support development of skills in using their tool. Find out more here.

Moving away from general digital skills...

National Centre for Computing Education

Has an extensive range of free online training courses that are still running and can support you to develop your subject knowledge in computing at all key stages. They also count towards our Primary Computing and GCSE Computer Science certificates.

They also have a range of online materials to support teachers whilst schools and colleges are closed and learning is taking place remotely. Find out more here.

The EXA Foundation

The EXA Foundation have a range of resources designed to support development of skills around GCSE Computer Science but can be of value to a range of subjects and settings. They also run a range of local Raspberry Jam events and teach meet style training which have now moved online. Training resources include:

Getting Started with Raspberry Pi – With a Raspberry Pi you can build robots, learn to code, and create all kinds of weird and wonderful projects. Creating projects with a Raspberry Pi is fun once you’ve mastered the basics. The guides below help you start from newbie zero to Raspberry Pi hero.

Essential Scratch – Scratch is a free graphical programming language developed by MIT included with Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi. Designed to be fun, educational, and easy to learn, Scratch has the tools for creating interactive stories, games, art, simulations, and more, using block-based programming.

Users program visually in Scratch by dragging blocks from the block palette and attaching them to other blocks like a jigsaw puzzle, this reduces syntax errors. The guides below take you through building your own Scratch projects.

Essential Minecraft – Minecraft is a creative 3D block-based game which has achieved monumental success; selling over 30 million copies worldwide. These guides will help you get stuck into Minecraft, build a house, and get started with the Minecraft-Python API.

Python Resources – are also available

For information and to access the resources, click here.

Sync Education

A series of webinars on using different apps in the classroom (both a physical or a virtual one). Predominantly iPad based and suitable for primary and secondary settings.