Ed Tech in HE Reflections

You may not have heard of List.ly yet--I had not actually before I opted to review this tool. If you're looking for a mechanism to incorporate social media, this is one to evaluate. In considering a possible activity incorporating one of the volumes of social media tools available, I felt this particular tool held a tremendous amount of value dependent on how it is implemented. In the link below, I outlined possible applications for this tool. Link to learning design document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3n7-Sg9tVMnU0hrVzBUeDhqS2c/view?usp=sharing   See earlier blog posts for more detail on the List.ly tool, as well.

My goal here was to c reate a student support resource to include in an online course or syllabus. It was important to be able to identify how this would help students, specifically, as the focus is on learner support & engagement. One of the tools that I have not yet implemented but could see as beneficial to students in the psychology classes that I teach relating to human development/lifespan development is Storify. The intent behind the integration of this tool is multi-fold--student engagement being a major rationale, but also collecting information on a particularly relevant topic for the week(s) that we use Storify. It appears that their newest/pending iteration with Storify 2 may improve collaboration, as well, with additional functionality.  Here is an example that I located which shows the utility of this tool for a topic, shown here with the topic of "Using social media to get a job":  https://storify.com/PBSMediaShift/edshift-chat-using-social-media-to-get-

So let's take a look at 2 potential tool applications relating to the use of SM (social media) in the higher ed classroom.  1. Google Apps--specifically Google Docs. This tool has almost limitless possibilities, and I feel using it for classwide as well as group-driven curation activities is an incredible opportunity to allow students to collaborate without being limited by time and place. Here is a neat little intro video from the MERLOT repository that talks more about Google Docs: https://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=733524&hitlist=keywords%3Dgoogle%2520docs&fromUnified=tru e  In terms of how one might utilize Google Docs, a proposed activity I offer is to require students to search for an assigned topic, and to utilize Google Docs in a similar fashion to how one might use any wiki. Individual students would search for information, return to the central Google Doc location, and add in documentation. In a developmental psychology course, an examp

List.ly, among many popular curation-driven social media platforms, offers what appears to be useful opportunities for teaching and learning. The main plus to utilizing this tool appears to be collaboration opportunities. For example, in a course encouraging students to learn more about instructional design in education, one might assign list.ly and have students search for pre-made lists, and either note these, or append to them to encourage collaboration outside of the traditional or online classroom environment. Further, students would be able to search for a list and finding it missing, fill in knowledge gaps by creating their own. Here is one example that I found relating to this proposed scenario:  http://list.ly/list/zL0-teachers-as-designers-resources-to-inspire-in-week-3?feature=search Evaluation of the tool itself: List.ly is simple to create, as it allows you to generate the account by linking to other SM accounts. Further, it allows you to follow lists already made, t

While participating in a 3-part online workshop, I was asked to complete a reflection on my personal/professional philosophy on the use of SM (social media) in OL (online learning). In doing so, I started out with first laying out what I've done at this point. Here it is up to this point: SM has been used for connections with remote (OL) students. I began this initially by collaborating with a friend and colleague and building out an online VW in SL, many years ago. We actually built out a tremendous re-creation of our campus, which was interesting, but a time-waster in some ways as there were many educational opportunities to be had from pre-built sites on SL.  From this, I took my remote OL students on tours of sites--we were in a developmental psych and then an adult dev & aging class, so we toured a dementia site, an autism site, and many others. These allowed students to engage with others and immerse themselves into VR scenarios. One of the more interesting oppor