#UWinDig

The modern educator has a wide array of resources available that can enhance their teaching and maximize student learning. Within the last decade or so, there have been many developments by the way of tech and digital resources that can help educators teach to the individual learning needs of each of their students. Although it is helpful to have so many resources to choose from, it can be overwhelming to choose appropriate resources that actually enhance the lesson.

A wise man once said “with great power comes great responsibility”: this phrase stays true with modern access to resources. Educators far too often include tech and digital resources that are either ineffective or do not enhance their lessons as a result of the overwhelming selection they are exposed to. These resources are sometimes selected in order to add a tech element to their lesson, but have no real substance or add any value. Educators must be picky – choosy with the resources they use, ensuring that they actually add something positive to their lesson.

eCampusOntario understands the struggles that many educators face when trying to incorporate effective and valuable digital resources within their lessons. In an effort to mitigate these struggles, they have developed a module called ‘Extend’ that looks to help individuals select appropriate resources and utilize them to the maximum potential. There are different modules that approach the issue from multiple angles, however, I will be focusing on the potential of the module from the point of view of an educator. 

Extend emphasizes the importance of developing and maintaining digital literacy in order to safely use digital resources. Developing an understanding of the ulterior motives behind some of the resources available to us such as information sharing and target marketing can help educators select resources that are safe for their students to use. When selecting digital resources for your classroom, it must be understood that you are ultimately responsible for the ‘cyber safety’ of your students. You must be absolutely sure of what is happening with your students’ information.

 One of the points that extend outlines within its module is the idea of using digital resources in order to ‘spark’ new lesson ideas and using student feedback in order to improve these lessons. This is a framework called ‘Design-thinking-approach’: using digital resources in an effort to create innovative and engaging lessons. Student feedback will provide the educator with the necessary information they need in order to tailor the lesson to student needs and desires.

Extend also urges educators to ’empathize’ with their students in order to appropriately select resources for their lessons. Resources should be used in order to engage students and address their individual learning needs. It is common for educators to select resources based on their own personal learning preferences rather than selecting them with their students’ learning preferences in mind.

Extend provides effective and useful strategies to maximize the potential of the digital resources being used. They suggest that the teacher creates a mind map that outlines the uses of the resource, the needs of the students, as well and how the resource will be utilized. Although I am not personally the mind map type of person and will without a doubt never actually use one, I can see this being useful to someone who is a visual learner.

It is integral to first understand what the needs and challenges that are faced by your students first in order to appropriately select effective resources. Using this understanding of the struggles that are present in a classroom, an educator may select resources that look to address these struggles and effectively mitigate them.

One of the key parts of the process of sourcing, exploring and utilizing effective digital resources is prototyping, sharing and getting feedback on what you have done. Using the knowledge and experience of the teachers in your network will help you to ensure that you are utilizing sources to their maximum potential, and not just including digital resources in your lessons for the sake of incorporating tech. The changes you make to your lesson based on the feedback you receive is the final step in the process of exploring, analyzing and selecting a digital resource that will enhance your lesson.

Although I do think that extend can be useful for some people who are trying to navigate through the congested world of digital resources, I do not find it to be particularly useful for my own individual needs. I look forward to seeing how my fellow classmates feel about the module, as well as how they have chosen to summarize its uses.

Have a look at EcampusOntario’s ‘Extend’ here and begin the process of selecting effective and appropriate digital resources.

Looking back to 2008/2009, I thought Facebook was the ultimate tool for connecting with friends and finding new friends who didn’t go to my school. Seemingly everyone between the ages of 12 and 30 were using Facebook, and if you weren’t, you were missing out. Fast forward to today, and you’ll realize that Facebook no longer holds this same level of popularity among young social media users. Currently, I only really use Facebook in order to keep in contact with fellow students, as it is an easy way to communicate without having to exchange numbers. I rarely post anything. This seems to be the case among many of my other friends who are just barely hanging on to platform. According to Matt Rosoff’s Article, 44% of millennial users have decided to delete the Facebook app from their phone. This drop in user popularity goes beyond trends and new social media platforms.

Rosoff explains that Facebook’s declining popularity among millennial users is closely linked to Facebook’s scandalous year. Facebook was found to be involved in two main scandals; allowing Russian operatives to utilize the platform spread fake news in an attempt to manipulate the 2016 US election, as well as instances of improperly using the personal data of its users. Obviously, these scandals have struck a nerve with millennial social media users, but why mainly them? What is causing these young people to jump ship?

The largely media literate millennial social media using population has become less and less comfortable with sharing their personal information on a website such as Facebook. A solid understanding of the importance of protecting personal information has driven many young users away from Facebook, for an understandable fear that their information was not safe. Many people of older generations may not have this same media literacy, and are much less bothered by the scandals that Facebook has been involved in. This may explain why Facebook remains popular among older social media users. These older social media users may not have the necessary media literacy skills to decipher between ‘fake news’, shared with them in order to manipulate their opinions on certain matters. This skill may also be absent among the younger generation. Although they are highly digitally literate in their own ways, our youth may not always be able to look at everything they see online through a skeptical lens, as they should be.

This article helps to reveal the real issue with posting online. As teachers, we are constantly reminded that anything we post on social media can be found by anyone. This is why it is so integral to be careful with what you’re posting on any particular platform. We have to now pass along some of the useful lessons of this article to our students. Our youth needs to understand the implications of having personal information on social media. Although we often think of ourselves as the manipulators of these various platforms, it is we who are being manipulated. We need to remind our students that personal information should stay private, because you never know how that information is being used.

This article definitely shifted my opinions on the matter of privacy and social media . Previously, I had never really been too weary about putting my information on social media. I had thought that anything that was marked as ‘private’ would stay as such, and that anything that I deemed ‘public’ could be shared. Unfortunately, platforms such as Facebook has proved on multiple occasions that they cannot be trusted with our private info, which will undoubtedly result in its continuing downfall. Personally, I will continue to use Facebook for communication purposes, however, I will stay away from putting up any personal information. I will bring the main ideas of this article into the classroom as I believe that it is integral that students understand that their information is not as safe as they may have initially thought.

#UWinDig

Link to my twitter essay

Link to Matt Rosoff’s article

Although teachers have been increasingly incorporating more and more tech into their classrooms, does this really mean that we are in an age of digital literacy and authentic education? According to Ashley Hinck in the article ‘Digital Ghosts in the Modern Classroom’, we have yet to take the leap away from standardized education. Efforts to create digital literacy within the classroom environment often involves template-based web applications. These applications are useful for getting students antiquated with tech, however, they do not allow for much exploration or creativity.

I believe that in order to have students become truly digitally literate, we need to provide them with the opportunity to explore and create. The elimination of these templates will surely result in some failure, but it is important for students to understand that failure is an essential part in the process of learning. This shift from template-based learning to active exploration will help us to achieve the shift from standardized to authentic education.