Monday 18 June 2012

Activity Nine

The reality of today’s fast changing world is that,
‘People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to’. (NMC.2012, p4)

As education providers we are challenged to keep one step ahead of the game. The School of Veterinary Nursing has been pro- active on this and as a result is well placed for the next round, the move towards mobile learning.
Most of our students use either laptops or iphones in class. There are positive and negatives of this. They can sign in to moodle, and follow the course notes, they regularly google answers to curly questions that come up and find you tube videos to share. The disadvantage I notice mostly is the capacity for the disengaged to distract those around them and I have had class members asking others to turn it off as they can’t concentrate.
With so much information at our fingertips now the real skill in using it is the ability to sift and rate information.
‘Sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information are paramount.’ (NMC.2012)
 The Y generation are much more media savvy than my own generation, but still require guidance through the maze of veterinary information out there. Drug companies pushing, internet forums offering questionable advice, facebook friends answering questions, it is all available and accessed by our students. 
A current trend technology to work with this freely available and often excellent information is TED ed. This is a new platform through which teachers can build short lessons around short videos. After, or while watching the videos on TED Ed students answer multiple choice and short answer questions about what they're seeing and hearing, they get instant feedback on the multi choice questions.
This site allows me to hand pick use the fantastic resources that are available on youtube, I could even make and use my own videos (workload allowing) and structure an appropriate lesson around it. The format is fairly simple and it has been criticized for this. I see joy in its simplicity.
Take the tour @

The New Media Consortium. 2012The Horizon Report. Available at:
Accessed on 18.6.12.

1 comment:

  1. I too like it simple. This could be especially important where students' attention spans are shortening at a rapid rate. That's ironic really isn't it.

    Yes as a teacher you are acting as a broker of the vast quantities of information out there. Therefore skills in facilitation and information brokering are vastly more important than being good at traditional lecturing approaches.

    One of the most important skills, in my view, that teachers and students need is digital information literacy. They quickly need to learn how to recognise the type of information that is required, how to find it, and when they find it they must be able to evaluate its worth, manage it effectively (store and distribute) and use it ethically.

    They must also be able to create their own information resources from all the sources available out there. The teacher can help develop students' digital information skills by not providing everything, and by encouraging them to also create information resources.

    Could students also be encouraged to create resources using TED ed, and to suggest multiple choice questions? This could be very engaging for them, and would up the learning challenge while saving you some time not having to create everything.

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