The last time you heard from me, I talked about the interviews we had conducted for the Pathways project. I’m still working on Pathways, but I’ve also taken on a new role as a Graduate Teaching Associate (GTA). This has provided new opportunities for me to grow and develop, and new opportunities for professional development. Over the month of February, I participated in the Digital Flagship Educator’s teaching certification. This training, which is given by the University Institute of Teaching and Learning (UITL), seeks to prepare teaching staff (including GTAs like me!) to utilize active learning techniques in their classrooms such as incorporating the technology kits that incoming OSU students receive. Additionally, UITL is seeking to improve digital literacy and device fluency in both instructors and students. In order to accomplish this, UITL has designed a 5-week teaching endorsement course. For each of the 5 weeks, we had readings involving active learning, digital literacy, online course design and more. We met for about 2 hours a week and spent most of the time learning how to use different apps that students have access to, completing small projects using each of the apps. We are finishing the course by creating a final project of our choosing.
This opportunity for professional development has been invaluable to me. I currently teach the labs for the required first-semester engineering course and am learning how to meaningfully incorporate active learning opportunities into my lectures, as well as offer opportunities for students to improve their digital literacy and device fluency. For example, I currently have my students take a survey on the first day of class that covers information such as their preferred name, their intended major, and other basic information. Next semester, I’m planning an activity where my students interview each other, create a profile page of the classmate they interviewed using software on their iPad, and submit it to me online. Now, this doesn’t sound like much of a change, but this one activity will teach students how to download a PDF from the internet, import it into their program of choice, edit it, export it, and turn it in. All of these skills will be important for their future success in college, and they are things I often see my students struggle with.
This struggle surprised me initially: computers were not nearly as ubiquitous when I was growing up as they are now, and I still remember getting CDs with free trials of the internet when I was in elementary school. Surely, I thought, college freshmen, as “digital natives”, would be more technologically savvy than I am. What I was witnessing in my students was made apparent by one of the articles we read during the course of the digital flagship training, “The myth of the digital native and the multitasker” by Kirschner and De Bruyckere. This article, which highlights the importance of teaching digital literacy and device skills today, is listed the reference below, if you’d like to read it. I am planning to use this training opportunity as a launching point to advance my career and support my students, both now and in the future.
For further reading:
Kirschner, P. A., & De Bruyckere, P. (2017). The myths of the digital native and the multitasker. Teaching and Teacher Education, 67, 135–142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.06.001