Part of this post is taken from my letter of application.
The memo circulated throughout the hospital quickly. It read “The Medical Officer of Health has declared an outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)…”. I felt a sense of impending doom, partly over the spread of the disease and partly over the impact it would have on my work. I was a manager at the hospital, responsible for the continuing education of approximately 300 paramedics in our region. We ran theory classes and hands-on workshops almost daily at the hospital and the SARS outbreak brought that to an abrupt end. Even staff education at the hospital, in retrospect, would be negatively impacted by the outbreak (Ali, A. 2004). I had to be resourceful. My staff and I rented local recreation facilities and we explored technologies for alternative delivery of our theory classes. We began using a synchronous online leaning platform and created crude screencasts using narrated PowerPoint which we distributed on CD-ROM. Two years later I accepted a teaching position in the School of Health and Wellness at Georgian College. My experience from the SARS outbreak inspired me to continue to explore educational technologies. This has included Blogs, Wikis, student response systems, digital assignments, synchronous online learning, Podcasting (iTunes U), screencasting and QR codes to name a few. As I continued to teach synchronously online at Georgian, it struck me that neither a “snow day” nor another pandemic, as other institutions have learned in their emergency planning (Meyer, K.A., Wilson, J. L., 2011), would interfere with student learning.
This field has been evolving at the speed of Moore’s Law and research is needed to distinguish between what will suffer the fate of a mere fad and what will endure with positive results (Raths, 2013; Maddux, 2003).
My primary reason for enrolling in the MET program was to learn about education theory and to develop a deeper understanding of how we learn and how technology integration into the classroom can play a greater role. I have been using a number of technologies in the classroom for a few years and have developed a basic knowledge of the “how to”. Moving forward, my goal is to learn more about technologies I know little about and to learn about technologies I have not yet tried in my teaching. But more importantly, I want to develop a greater understanding how do we choose the best technologies, how to evaluate the evidence and how do we know which technologies are effective in improving learning in the right hands?
Here are some of the technologies I would like to learn/learn more about:
Google Drive, Google Drive for Educators, Google Hangouts, student response systems, ePortfolios, creating a blog (I’m struggling with this one), synchronous online learning platforms (other than Bb Collaborate with which I am very familiar), augmented reality, etc
References
Ali, A., Baron, D., Berall, G., Berger, L., Glassman, E., Kwolek, S., Loutfy, M.R., Low, D.E., McGeer, A., McRitchie, D., Mederski, B., Ofner, M., Rose, K., Rutledge,T., Wallington, T., White, D., Wolff, B., Wong, T. (2004). Hospital Preparedness and SARS. Emerging Infective Diseases, 10(5): 771–776.
Wilson, J.L., & Meyer, K.A., (2011) . The Role of Online Learning in the Emergency Plans of Flagship Institutions, Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Volume IV, Number I
Raths, D. (2013, Dec.). Predictions for 2013. T.H.E. Journal, v39 n10 p8-15
Maddux, C. D. (2003, Nov.). Fads, Distance Education, and the Importance of Theory