Tech.
Using tech for good.
With the Great Pivot to online teaching, it became commonplace at advice sessions and webinars for facilitators to warn new online instructors not to let the technology overwhelm them or their students. “Take it slow,” went the advice, “adopt maybe one or two apps but not much more lest the tech get in the way of the teaching and learning.” Many instructors unfamiliar with online teaching came to the table with some trepidation that their lives would now be dominated by technology, and the instructional developers sought to put their minds at ease: online teaching was first and foremost about teaching and learning, and second about the online bits.
Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash
We’re all online instructors now, and will be for a while yet. The advice to take it slow with tech still stands, but as we become more comfortable with virtual teaching, we should not be too timid about testing the tech waters. There are applications and software out there that can be put to good and productive use in online courses. Few of them will be perfect: some will have steeper learning curves than others, some will cost money, some will promise much but deliver little. But those aren’t reasons for instructors not to look at what’s available, kick the tires, and see if there are apps that can facilitate a particular teaching or learning objective.
And there are tools to help you with the tools - metatools that can help instructors sort through the crazy proliferation of digital and networked applications that might be of use. Here are three helpful ones:
Top Tools for Learning is an annual survey conducted by Jane Hart. It provides information on the top 200 tools for learning as identified by some 2600+ survey participants. In addition to the general list, there are also lists for the top 100 tools in personal learning, workplace learning, and education. This is a good place to start if you’re looking for ideas about what’s out there.
To figure out how to evaluate what’s out there and whether it’s suitable for your purposes, Lauren Antsey and Gavan Watson have developed a rubric for evaluating e-learning tools. This essay explains their rationale and provides a link to the rubric. Not every aspect of the rubric might apply to your situation, but the questions and criteria will help you figure out what’s important to you with regard to bringing apps into a course, and can alert you to potential pitfalls or issues you may not have considered.
eCampusOntario runs the wonderful Ontario Extend professional learning program for anyone who’s trying to improve their digital skills in teaching and learning. You can do it on your own, and it is designed to give you a broader context within which you can make out what kind of digital educator you wish to be.
For the rest of this week the posts in this series are going to be focused on specific applications that I have found to be either really useful in teaching, or which I think have a great potential for being so. I’m going to be contextualizing these choices using a framework originally developed by Simon Bates at UBC and adapted by eCampusOntario for their original Ontario Extend offering. The Anatomy of 21st-Century Educators serves as a kind of wake up call for higher education instructors: we’re not just teachers anymore — we wear a number of chapeaux in the service of our teaching, with technology assisting us along the way. This week’s posts will identify apps that support those roles.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 55/60.