Mobile Technologies - Friend or Foe?

 Welcome back readers for another blog of what educators really want to say to an admin but the union dues do not cover "honest" feedback to a principal coverage. This week I want to focus on mobile technologies. Today many studies show that young children below five years old that are exposed to regular "tablet time" have negative effects to their attention and developmental delays (Mantilla & Edwards, 2019). Now before we go and burn all the tablets being used by children and young adults we must remember, a tablet is a tool. Similar to a hammer, used in the wrong way can hurt more than it can build. These same studies support the idea that many of this tablet time can be beneficial if the time using the device is monitored and academic. Sounds about right, as long as someone guides you, you should be alright. This is where mobile technologies comes in. Many places in public, coffee shops, malls, parks, etc. You look around, and people are attached to their phones like mindless zombies. The clear answer to my title is that these demonic devices are foes, right?! Wrong.

As an avid supported of new and innovative technologies, I am a firm believer that it all depends on how we implement these technologies. This correlates to my mobile technologies implementation plan which I have designed. For reference the plan can be accessed with this link for reference. By incorporating mobile technologies and Google Classroom, I believe that this plan can help educators become more exposed to innovative technologies via mobile trainings that will not take them away for entire days like district PD (professional developments). While I do believe that PDs have their places; as new technologies become available throughout the school year, it becomes difficult for a teacher to take time away from the classroom. This is where the Google Classroom platform shines. As a learning management system (LMS) with mobile capabilities, this serves as a sectionalized modules for learners to learn as they go in at their convenience. This takes away from the worry of needing a substitute or needing to take away time from the classroom. This helps teachers learn as they can without the need to take them away from other responsibilities, not only their professional ones. It is known, many educators have responsibilities outside of the classroom. It is time we accommodate the lifestyles by creating on the go modules which anyone can pick up, pause and continue when life allows them to. I believe that by modifying the way we can access important learning modules, we as educators can continue to work to creating the most effective learning environments for our learners. 

References

Mantilla, A., & Edwards, S. (2019). Digital technology use by and with young children: A systematic review for the Statement on Young Children and Digital Technologies. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 44(2), 182-195.

Immersive Learning and the Learners it Benefits

 Readers, welcome back to the crazy world of education. I hope I don't disappoint by walking you through this wild wild world. As education goes, teaching resources can be scarce. This is what makes it difficult to help our learners when we know different tools are out there but we do not have access to them. Immersive Learning can be extremely beneficial to learners in understanding various concepts by being able to "jump into" the content. Some examples of this is Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). Both of these forms of immersive learning helps learner place themselves in places not normally reachable by simply flipping a switch. The video in the link details how some of those immersive learning experiences can be facilitated. While using immersive media one must know the basics of why they are using the media. I detailed this as a five step process to check if they are appropriately using immersive media. The five steps consist of designing a plan, creating a process, selecting the right platform, preparing learners, and evaluate the effectiveness of the media. By following these steps, you are able to plan and evaluate whether the media is actually beneficial for your learners. Using immersive media such as VR headsets can be very beneficial for helping students understand different aspects of content un any given units. One way in which I used VR headsets was having my students take a virtual field trip to the Great Wall of China. This gave students a visual representation of how large and massive the colossal structure was. This helped my students understand the magnitude of the protection it gave China versus the Mongols. Again, I say this because technology is like any tool, it can be very useful, or it can be a waste of time where learners are too busy to look at the Great Wall and instead are looking at the tourists in the images. Buyer beware and plan accordingly when using immersive media, for your sake and most importantly for your learners. 

The Web of Education

Greetings readers, if you are still reading, I greatly appreciate your support. Being an educator, you learn that you are definitely not alone when it comes to teaching. As you maneuver and learn, the proverb, "it takes a village to teach a child," rings truer and truer. Professional Learning Networks (PLN) offer a connection to other educators and learning specialists as a form of support and collaboration. I have two recommendations for all educators: find a PLN and join it. We as educators, can always learn something new and innovative. If you as an educator think you have reached the peak of your curriculum, I can without a doubt tell you, you are completely wrong. Like any professional from doctor to athlete, you need to continuously refine your craft. If we stay complacent, our methods and instructional practices become outdated. Compare this to technology, do we still use the same technologies as 5 years ago? Of course not. In the age of technology that we are in, you cannot afford not to be up to date with what is current. Why should our teaching strategies be any different? I am a firm believer that, you get what you put into anything. Dedication and effort really do go a long way. My learners know that I dedicate large amounts of time to preparing and adapting my lessons to them. Hearing them mention that "I work too much" or "this must have taken a long time" reassure me that I am putting in my honest effort. In response, they are motivated to "match my energy" as they so refer to it. But not only the indirect motivation, but the actual strategies and resources have to be well throughout. Going back to my village proverb, as an educator, many will tell you, using your resources (PLN), as a supportive system to share ideas and instructional resources. If you are a less experienced teacher, these PLNs are gold mines for them as they may be starving for anything they can get. We can all recount our times as an eager educator, wanting to change the world one student at a time. The challenge is, how do we do this? Well your more experienced colleagues are where they should look.

Shifting over to my personal PLN, I created my own cycle of self-educational improvement. I believe that the next step for me to continuously improve falls under the professional learning and improved instructional strategy implementation. I believe one area that I need to improve is expanding my professional networking and working with specialists who have classroom proven strategies. This is where LinkedIn will come into play. As a social networking site for professionals. This will allow me to connect with other education professionals in discussion boards and expand my knowledge on up to date methods and research. The next two resources which I plan on integrating in my PLN is AVID and Edutopia. Both of these resources offer instructional strategies which are backed by research to benefit students. By raising the academic rigor in the classroom, I will be able to enhance my instructional practices and raise the bar for my students to benefit them in my classroom.

Microlearning - Building Community

 Welcome back readers to the wild wild world of education and the perspective of one of its own members. Today's blog will focus on Microlearning. This beneficial practice in education is in my opinion (and backed by research) one of the most important as it highlights what is becoming a sad reality. Before we get into what microlearning, I want to take a moment to ask the readers, do people today have a shorter attention span than twenty years ago? ten years ago? Then answer is more than likely going to be yes, not just learners but adults do not have the same attention we once had. We can blame technology all we want, but at the center of this attention crisis, is a shift in priorities. So how does microlearning fit into this? Microlearning is an instructional strategy which emphasizes short and focused bits of information to make learning more digestible and retained by the learners (Andriotis, 2021). This is where we want to shift our focus, in that microlearning is taking with what little time we have to work with, and maximize our output (learning).

Using the knowledge we know about microlearning, we can use it as reference to a training course I  created about using Google Forms as a resource to connect with your learners. This workplace training agenda and training plan can each be accessed in the links.  This training adheres to microlearning in that it teachers learners how to use Google Forms to create daily check-ins to understand their learners more. As adults, the attention span problem in some is a problem, but overall, having busy lives and commitments do not allow us to learn what we would like to learn. By creating a short and targeted training which works with limited time, this allows learners to have access to new content and resources and ideally spread more knowledge about successful practices. 

References 

Andriotis, N. (2021, May 12). What is microlearning: A complete guide for beginners. eLearning Industry. https://elearningindustry.com/what-is-microlearning-benefits-best-practices