News: Wellbeing blog — SU elections and dealing with info overload!

As well as the main College social media accounts, in the Student Wellbeing team we have our own social media pages too! You can find links at the bottom of the blog.

At Nottingham College we value student feedback, and it is important that our learners have a voice, especially during this unprecedented time. 

Over the next few weeks, we are running various online student voice meetings through Microsoft Teams. This means we can still hear their views and work with them remotely. 

We’re also running elections right now for our Nottingham College’s Students’ Union! 

It’s a bit different for our students this year, but we want to ensure that we have SU members ready to support students in September. So, our current students can now apply for one of our exciting roles. The deadline to apply is Friday 22^nd May and our current students can see all the details on the Student Wellbeing Hub in our student intranet. 

If you’re finding all the well-intentioned health advice out there a bit overwhelming, you’re not alone. Every time you look at your social media newsfeeds there will be more information about how to stay fit and healthy in lockdown. Some people love this, and it really helps them, but others can find it hard with so much information. 

So, we wanted to share some information from a study done by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) on behalf of the UK government to improve the population’s mental health and wellbeing. 

It showed that the most beneficial activities for our mental health can be categorised under 5 headings, with simple explanations that are easy to understand and put into action. Why not try giving some a go — it doesn’t have to be all of them, just whatever you feel comfortable with. 

1. Connect – talk and listen to others – even if it is online – it’s better than nothing and helps us feel less isolated.
2. Be active – do what you can, don’t feel under pressure to compete, and enjoy whatever you do to improve your mood.
3. Take notice – remember the simple things – this can be an online mindfulness and meditation app or simply going for a walk and focussing on your surroundings.
4. Keep learning — this might seem harder while you’re not at College, but do as much online learning as you can, and try this government skills toolkit if you fancy something different.
5. Give – whether you can give your time to help the NHS, or just call a friend, anything you can do safely to benefit others will make you feel good.

If you want to read more – you could read this 5 ways to wellbeing during social distancing article. 

Over the last few weeks, with everyone having to switch over to remote learning in their lessons, we’ve also started to move enrichment over to a remote platform too. 

After speaking to students, one of the most popular suggestions was using the FIFA20 game and creating College tournaments. 

We’ve run a couple of tournaments to find the top three players on each console, who will then make up the College team in a national competition run by AoC Sport. After that, a league will start with promotion and relegation. 

This could be the start of an eSports section of Enrichment, using our students’ love of computer games in a healthy and safe competitive environment! 

We’ll be adding to this, so look out for more examples soon!