Enable
Teaching Digital
The Open University, in collaboration with Cisco Networking Academy, created PT-Anywhere - a remote, HTML5 version of the Packet Tracer simulator. This offered students and teachers the opportunity to use Packet Tracer without installing anything on their desktop computers or smart devices as part of an integrated learning experience.
Funded by the UFITrust, the course Discovering Computer Networks was created and released late 2019, hosting 28 different remote Packet Tracer based micro-lab activities.
The OU are now working on improving the experience for vision impaired students, ensuring that the technology will work with commonplace operating systems based screen readers and NVDA.
For more information, please follow this link.
Digital Enablement
Teaching digital technologies is open to everyone of all abilities and disabilities. The digital workforce requires everyone and anyone who is willing to become the digital professional of the future. The global Cisco Networking Academy (NetAcad) community, has worked with many disability focused organisations since inception, as well as traditional education establishments, who have a proven track record of disability engagement.
NetAcad is nowadays more accessible than it ever was. Its culture is focused on enabling students and solving all realistic challenges - working with educators and partner organisations.
Diverse Abilities
Everyone has the potential to become a network engineer, cyber security professional, system support specialist or programmer. Often those with cognitive differences are sought by government security agencies - there is a community of vision impaired network engineers and adaptations can be made, to help those with physical impairments be programmers.
Digital Accessibility
This site focuses on four primary disability domains - vision impairment, hearing loss, physical disabilities and cognitive challenges. We are aware that there is no 'one size fits all' model, where often every individual requires a portfolio of adaptations. The aim of this site is to support teachers new to disability support as well as enhance the resource base of experienced educators.
Often, challenges exist when students with diverse needs enter the domain of digital technologies. At Teaching Digital - we do not pretend to have all the answers, preferring to draw upon the collective experience of our community and explore how we may potentially help.
Equip!
Our ambition is to offer this micro-site as a toolkit, equipping teachers with the resources to support the teaching of digital technologies, focusing on the NetAcad programme. However, aware that this could be equally used in other domains, you do not need to read everything, simply dive into the sections that appear to be the most relevant, then explore, develop and digest what we have to offer.