week 1. digital age teaching professionals.
Which of the sets of criteria seem the most informative and relevant to your experiences?
The first point in Chickering and Ehrmann’s article resonated with me and my experiences in my new position, and ties into the second point as well. “Good practice encourages contacts between students and faculty”. The fact that communication technologies allow for an availability and access to your professor is hugely important. My school board has adopted Google Apps for Education (GAFE), and this productivity suite is inherently about sharing, communicating and collaborating. On each app there appears a “Share” button, and with this click, a student can share ideas and projects with a teacher, and vice versa. The chat function within the products encourages group conversations, and the Suggested Edits feature allows for a teacher (or a peer) to “suggest” an edit to a student’s work, and not simply take over and fully edit, as what may have been done in the past so often. This, in my opinion, opens up a dialogue. This simple feature allows for the student to take ownership of his/her ideas, as they may choose to “accept” or “reject” the suggestion – but as a teacher, perhaps I would encourage the student to justify his/her idea, and why the suggestion was rejected – because maybe the student is on to something that the teacher didn’t initially see! It happens. I mention GAFE simply because in the article, the authors write about the conversation “stopping” after feedback has been given. Therefore, student motivation stops, and it’s on to the next. Student work becomes a product to receive a mark and not much else. GAFE offers solutions to keep the conversation going, and if you are using the apps well in your class, a back-and-forth discourse between teacher and student, or student and student, should be an expectation. It should be a natural part of the classroom!
Are there any other criteria that you normally use for assessing your technological proficiency?
I would say that teaching students about Citizenship/Literacy (digital and otherwise) ranks high. While students may be “digital natives”, teachers recognize the importance of tracking one’s digital footprint, providing proper attribution to an author’s work, and how to think critically about what is happening on various platforms online. It is often a staggering endeavour simply because there is so much “behind the scenes” information, and some students do find it difficult to “properly and respectfully” navigate through social media, for example (and even email or chats), simply because it’s not a skill that has been taught explicitly by many of their teachers. There is an assumption that “they already know how”. While they may know how to use the tools, they perhaps have yet to display and think about the actual maturity it takes to participate in this online culture.
What are some of the “digital-age” skills that you plan to learn and start practicing, or want to further develop?
I would love to develop a good grasp of using various digital media to communicate my thinking, and then help others do the same to develop a digital portfolio that is truly exciting for students.