Journey through Personalized Learning: Transforming Education

Journey through Personalized Learning: Transforming Education: Take a moment and think about the students who are currently in your classes. When you teach a lesson on any given day there are typically...

Something for everyone

Rita Axford presenting on her Fulbright experience

RHCHP Faculty Development Day was held last month in the Mountain View Room. The
day featured something for everyone including research, learning technologies, a panel discussion on social media, and even a fascinating look at a Middle Eastern educational culture as seen through the eyes of a Fulbright scholar.

What was personally most enjoyable were the presentations by last year's Teaching and Learning with Technology Micro-grant award winners. TLTM is a competitive grant program funding small scale projects for examining the effects of technology on teaching and learning. I was amazed at what our incredibly talented faculty can do with as little as $1,000. Projects ranged from an examination of student reaction to audio-enhanced presentations, to the use of game theory for instructing Nursing students on the handling of end-of-life patient and family issues, to the development of an smart device app.

Kudos to RHCHP for sponsoring this most worthwhile event and for sharing with the Regis community.

Social media – The scary, the awesome, and the scary awesome

I attended the Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium held on October 24^th at Metro State University in Denver and wanted to share a little bit about a social media session that I attended called “Social Media – The scary, the awesome, and the scary awesome.”

Why did I choose to attend the social media session? I have to admit that I am not particularly devoted to social media and often wonder when the buzz of twitter will die down. I think to myself, what possible use or service could all of these different social media sites provide that makes them so relevant in today’s society? Someone must get it because, Facebook has something like a quarter of the world’s population enrolled on its site. That’s no small feat. So, I chose to attend the session on social media out of curiosity and to see how social media might be able to enhance the learning environment.

The presenter started by quizzing the audience to see if they could recognize the various social media site logos. I realized that there are many more social media sites than I had initially thought and some sites I had never identified as social media. The sites include: Flickr, Instagram, Blogger, WordPress, Good Reads, Pinterest (a personal favorite), Tumblr, Wikipedia, You Tube, Vimeo, Stack Exchange, Reddit, Octocat, and GitHub.

Some sites are great for photo sharing, others are good for discussion, while even others encourage group engagement. This is the key to social media in the learning environment I discovered, no one site is right for all circumstances. The presenter emphasized creativity in the incorporation of social media. Good reads for example is a site where anyone can go to post their review of a book and to comment on other’s reviews. This could be added onto a reading assignment or incorporated into a class discussion.

While the presenter didn't have time to go into the benefits of each site, we only had twenty-five minutes, he did leave us with curiosity. He pressed us to explore more social media sites and to think more abstractly about how they could be used in our day to day lives and in courses.