"We can positively impact their lives": Tackling the need to improve basic digital skills at Northampton College
In our latest Digital Northants Story, we hear from Valentina Meninno from Northampton College on the real need for young people to learn basic digital skills and how she’s helping students to improve their digital literacy.
In my position as Learning Facilitator Coordinator at Northampton College, I am dedicated to fostering the growth of our students in all areas and curricula, enhancing their academic and digital skills. This takes lots of different forms - across the week I’ll deliver several sessions on digital and academic skills, plus one to ones and support drop-ins. I’ve also supported some of our staff with digital skills too, where they may need additional bits of help.
I’m based at our Booth Lane campus in Northampton within the Digital and Academic Resources Centre, but I also work across Lower Mounts in the town centre and at our Daventry campus too, to provide a basic academic and digital skills service for everyone in the college.
Our services have to be flexible around the needs of students. Some of our students come from challenging backgrounds - perhaps they didn’t do very well in school, and they come to college because it’s different and it’s a fresh start for them. They can study something they love and you can see them wanting to progress and learn. It is completely different to school, and we need to try to make sure they have all the tools and support they need to progress.
The students I work with come from all different kinds of courses: social sciences, health and social care, childcare, motor vehicle , music, performing arts, media studies, game design, photography, art, public services, sport, business and so on. It’s an incredibly wide variety. Then we have adult students that just need to do their Maths and English. They all benefit from our services and level up mostly with the digital side.
Our digital skills scheme is run across the whole curriculum. I did a lot of research into the digital skills students need. They must be able to navigate operating systems and use software like Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). They must be able to use word processing software for creating documents, managing spreadsheets, sharing and attaching files, to handle email communication, browse the internet for research and problem-solving, and have basic file management skills such as creating folders and organising files.
In today’s job market, these are the skills that employers value the most and this is one of the reasons why my aim is to get our students to be proficient in digital skills, literacy and capabilities through our DigiSkills Scheme.
Our motivation for starting this initiative stemmed from the realisation among our group of Learning Facilitators in the library that certain students were in dire need of support with essential digital skills. We all had a shared idea to create something that would help them.
There is a commonly held belief that all young people are naturally adept at technology, but this assumption is not always accurate. Young people are adept at using their phones and Snapchat, but they often have difficulties with basic Google searches, fact-checking, and even reading in some cases - and it is often because they are more comfortable looking at icons rather than written language.
It is accepted that the older generation needs the most support with digital skills, but the younger generation’s needs are just as important. I strongly believe that if we provide young people with the chance to learn, we can positively impact their lives.
Technology’s prevalence makes it necessary to reinforce basic knowledge with students. We’ve had examples of students referencing Google as the source of knowledge for an essay rather than the website or article they found through Google. So we teach them how to give proper acknowledgement for the research they’ve done.
This gives them a real boost. For one of our digital skills tasks at the end of the year, we ask students to create a short step-by-step video guide. Some of them are amazed at how easy it is to actually create but a lot of work and research is needed for the content of the video. They get the experience of creating something like that and it benefits them enormously, not just with learning the digital aspect but with their confidence and capabilities.
In many ways, we are the Google of the college. Students, and teachers, come to us with problems and we try to help solve them. We look into solutions in a lot of depth and collaborate heavily with our Learning Technologist, EdTechs and IT department. We very much focus on the educational purpose of what, why and how a student needs to learn or be aware of a particular topic or use a particular platform.
Sometimes there will be challenges around a student not knowing how to use something like Word, PowerPoint or Excel. That could be a simple fix like sitting down with a student and showing them how to use a spreadsheet, up to wider problems, like during the lockdown periods when students were given Chromebooks to study and we had to remotely teach them how to use their device because they were completely different to the devices they were used to. To do that, we created GIFs, videos and accessible guides, for students with high needs, to show them how to use their Chromebooks.
And this is what I love most about my job. The constant learning, so that I can answer the random questions that come up. Finding things out for students. There’s so much knowledge and ongoing learning, especially with new technology.
At the moment we are heavily looking at the ethical use of AI and I’m really enjoying the research that’s going into that. Because the current hot topic is obviously the use of ChatGPT and similar AI tools. Our teachers have differing opinions on students using AI tools - some encourage it and others don’t.
That means my job is mainly around teaching students the ethics involved and how to use AI properly and responsibly, which will be in my ‘Student Guide to AI’. This ties in with how the college is changing the way it assesses students, where there’s a lot more emphasis on students fact-checking their own work now and planning more practical activities.
I firmly believe that equipping our students with the skills necessary for today's rapidly evolving world is crucial. We must ensure that this service is accessible to as many as possible, so our goal is to boost our students' development by providing them with fundamental digital skills and literacy.