Group items tagged

Rather than a Digital Native/Digital Immigrant dichotomy, students have a wide spectrum of digital competence positively correlating to their digital exposure.

1. Scaffolding

2. Time Line

3. Experts

This blog has provided me with an opportunity to share my learning, and more than anything else it has challenged me to be accountable in a way that no other professional development ever has. It has reminded me that I love to learn and it is part of a learning process that I truly love.

When I started, largely out of exasperation, to investigate the educational research literature for myself, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was some genuinely useful and scholarly work out there, which recognised the demands of different subjects and even admitted that university lecturers aren't all workshy and stupid... It's a shame that this better stuff doesn't seem to have fed through into the generic courses that most institutions offer. My personal advice to anyone starting out as a university teacher: find a few colleagues who take their teaching seriously (there are almost certain to be some in the department) and ask them for advice; sit in on their classes if possible; remember you'll never teach perfectly but you can always teach better; and close your ears to well-meaning interference from anybody who's never actually spent time at the chalkface!

Magueijo's could acknowledge that some people teaching these courses are genuinely concerned about improving teaching, and they need academics' help in designing better courses that do so. Sotto's side should acknowldge that however much they talk about how important teaching is (as if they discovered this, and academics did not know), they are not listening to the people attending their courses if those people feel utterly patronised and frustrated at the waste of their time. If academics treated their students like educationalists treat their student academics they'd be appalling teachers. A simple course allowing us to learn from a video of our own lectures would be immensely useful. Instead whole empires of education have developed that need to justify themselves and grow, so they subject us to educational jargon and make us write essays on the educationalist's pet theory.

I would have preferred that David Pritchard had written it; his comments above are perfect.

I have to wonder how many folks would jump in at all if they were afraid of the water. As David Truss points out, "too many people fear drowning and never get into the pool” and that in most Teacher Ed programs the amount of technology skill they leave the program with seems to be optional... to me that's like throwing a non-swimmer into the deep end.

I spend a day or two, sometimes a week “teaching folks to swim.” I give them the skills and we go SLOW.

There has been talk in the edtech community for a long time that we need to stop talking about the tools, but I disagree. You are always going to have those non-swimmers who finally find their way to the edge of the pool. Teach them what the water feels like and support them as they develop confidence in using the tool. When I share a tool like voicethread with a teacher, they can see so many ways it can be used in the classroom. They get excited about the potentials but they don’t understand the many concepts that go into it, embedding, and sharing, and privacy, and moderating comments, are so new to them…They are excited about being at the pool's edge, but it is like being thrown into that deep end for the first time.