Image Source: Pixabay CC-0
After the watching the virtual symposium presentations and reading all of the Unit 2 readings I have come to the conclusion that everyone in the world of ed tech is much smarter than me 
. I was really impressed by the depth to which the presenters took their material and how passionate they were about their topics. The readings made one thing very clear to me, I need to prepare my students for the real world and part of that preparation is to teach them to be professional, effective and responsible contributors to the online community. As Ryberg and Georgsen (2010) point out, a big problem with ensuring that todays youth are digitally literate is that their instructors may not be, so I should be leading by example. My overall goals are to build my web presence in a professional and meaningful manner, and to use that web presence to be an effective contributor to the educational community at large.
I plan to accomplish this by first off updating some of my dated social media sites, starting with LinkedIn and Twitter. I also will further develop some web tools that are new to me, mainly focusing on my WordPress site. Once these spaces are updated, I want to begin to contribute and share resources in a more effective way with the learning community both in the MALAT program and the online educational community. I hope to do this by not only posting often to my own blog site and responding to others in a timely fashion, but ensuring the posts are meaningful and add to the conversation (not to just post for the sake of posting).
As I am fairly tech savvy and have a good knowledge many educational tools and software from my time as a faculty mobile coach, I don’t envision many issues with finding content to share. My challenge will be first to apply solid pedagogy to those educational tools and to frame them in effective teaching practices, then to share these practices through my online identity. In order to do this I will have to put more time into researching proper pedagogy in teaching and learning with tech.
My goal is to have my digital profile updated and to have researched and posted 5-8 solid posts on teaching and learning with tech to my blog (and Twitter). I will consider myself successful if I can accomplish this by the end of LRNT 521.
References
Ryberg. T., & Georgsen, M. (2010). Enabling digital literacy. Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, 2(5).
Hey Steve!! Writing quickly to avoid Captcha being who it is.
It definitely also struck me that many instructors could be unprepared to help their students succeed, given their own lack of digital-savvy! Do you observe this in your current work? Are there any staff members unsupportive of the reality of the necessity of digital presences?
I’m running away, stupid Captcha!! #stupidcaptcha
Haha…stupid Captcha, I agree.
I have observed this quite often at my college as a faculty trainer. Many faculty were unprepared for our colleges change over to teaching and learning with iPads…that being said, I think our administration dropped the ball and did not provide faculty with enough training to support them in their transition from ‘traditional’ teaching to an environment where teaching with tech is an expectation.
Hi Steve,
I agree with you that we have to get our students ready to be successful in our digital word. I am teaching my students “Digital Business Etiquette” since Business Etiquette is so different when you are online compared to face to face.
I look forward to your future posts on learning and technology 🙂
May
Hi May,
Teaching business etiquette must be quite a challenge! I am just thinking about all of the emails I receive at the college and the tone that they are written in sometimes…I think everyone should have to take an email etiquette class.
Damned captcha! I clicked post, and lost it all! Ah well- learning to be digitally literate I guess!
I can see a similar plan for myself at this stage in the process of cultivating my digital presence. I really liked how you focused on the number of posts you will be making (quantitative), and also the fact you mentioned on my blog about having some qualitative evaluation based on the conversations that ensue. I will try to add the quantitative piece to my own plan. I also agree with your comment on spending more time with scholarly articles, in order to make informed decisions on how to develop an online identity. We need to learn through our own practice, but also learn from the pros (in order to become pro).
Hi Stuart,
It will be a challenge for me to use qualitative evaluations as most of my life seems to revolve around quantitative areas…for sure we need to learn from the pros.