Current Educational Technology

Educause:

The Educause website is a great resource for an educator of any level. One of the articles I read was found in the current issue of the Educause Review journal titled, Competency-Based Education: Technology Challenges and Opportunities by Mark Leuba. The article describes competency-based education (CPE) and how educators are interested in this concept, however current technology and learning management systems (LMS) are not compatible as necessary to support a rigorous high quality CPE program. The article provides data from a survey of where the technology is lacking and where it is working and how to utilize what is working to create better learning platforms. For example, inter-operatability across programs and courses and the competencies necessary to progress are met in multiple courses rather than just one as is with the credit hour courses (Leuba, 2015).
The interesting point I learned from this article is the current learning system used in the OKCU program, D2L, and the learning system I teach with, Blackboard, are participants in the technical interoperability pilot (TIP) project. I am grateful to be utilizing technical platforms that are part of forward thinking learning and education. I look forward to the development of CPE in higher education and how CPE will create more learning opportunities for students.

Leuba, M. (2015). Competency-based education: Technology challenges and opportunities. Educause Review. Retrieved from: http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/10/competency-based-education-technology-challenges-and-opportunities

The second article was found in one of the Educause Learning Initiatives (ELI) within the "7 things you should know" section. This particular topic was over the 7 things you should know about personalized learning. Personalized learning is a passion of mine as I based my start up business on the principles of custom or personalized learning concepts. The article provides information about how personalized learning works for the student and can be utilized by faculty to better teach toward the students' learning abilities. Although the article describes adaptive systems as the identifier of the students' learning abilities and thus creating a privacy concern, I am convinced that individual relationship and time spent the student can determine a students' personalized abilities aside from technology. The systems described in the article can be beneficial to faculty as they are researched and developed further and designed to allow the faculty the ability to spend more time on instruction (Feldstein, Hill, & Cavanagh, 2015).

Feldstein, M., Hill, P., & Cavanagh, T. (Contributors). (2015, September 8). 7 things you should know about personalized learning [blog post]. Retrieved from: http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/7-things-you-should-know-about-personalized-learning

Educause is a site I will utilize often to look for new ideas and technologies. This is a user friendly website with contributions from several researchers and educators. I highly recommend this site to any educator.


Atomic Learning:

This website has many resources for faculty who are new to learning and teaching with technology. I immediately began to search for a topic that would be helpful to me and found several. One topic that I forwarded to a friend of mine who is developing an online discussion board was the "effective online discussions" video. This topic has been talked about frequently as he is beginning to develop the use of online discussion within his class and I found this tutorial to be worthy and helpful.
I can see there are many helpful topics and some are free and most have  a cost associated with them. I would be interested in getting a quote for use in a program or this could be useful to a program who desires to incorporate online learning or even start an online program.
I am grateful to know this technology is available as a resource.

Google:

Google is one of my favorite references utilized in the classroom. I refer to it as " Dr. Google" to add humor to the conversation and as I bring Dr. Google into the conversation, there is always an educational moment related to how the student can determine if a reference found on Google is reputable. Rather than telling my students they cannot use google we learn about how to correctly use it as a resource tool to find quality references.
Google hangouts is a new option I found to be useful and I can see how this platform can allow me to expand my business model across the nation when I get ready. Another favorite from google is the Blogger capability-I enjoy writing and blogging and this is a great resource for education. This current course has utilized the blogger platform effectively and I have enjoyed the process.

Google hangout can be used in nursing education through tutoring and mentoring. I could use google hangout to get online with a student and provide assistance via live video chatting with screen sharing. This would provide a hands on, live, personal contact point with the student and hopefully assist them. This can be used anytime as long as both parties have Internet capabilities and a computer, laptop, or phone. I also like that google hangout allows for both android or iOS platforms. this is a great tool.

The current technology in nursing may not stay current as technology is ever changing and swiftly changing. Faculty would be advised to keep abreast with technology and not become comfortable with any one form but rather many forms and on a continuous journey to learn more.

Happy Teching!