Why I Teach

Saw this challenge by T2Tchat and Teacher2Teacher this morning and thought it sounded fun:

It was a bit difficult to put it in poetic form in 140 characters, so I had to be a little creative...

Why teach-Why learn? Why take a chance?
2 reach
2 burn
2 join the dance
2 encourage & inspire
Not fill a bucket
But light a fire #WHYITEACH

I'm looking forward to the responses. Hope you check it out, too. We can all use a little encouragement/reminder this time of year to keep going.

Here's a link to their video: Why I Teach  It's mostly related to K-12, but the message is the same for higher education.

Maryanne

Concept Mapping to Teach Clinical Reasoning

As nurse educators, we are challenged to prepare students to manage rapidly changing and increasingly complex health care environments. Effective patient care requires the nurse’s ability to recognize subtle patient cues, prioritize problems, act decisively, and evaluate outcomes through clinical reasoning. However, new graduate nurses often fall woefully short in these areas, indicating that traditional teaching methods are insufficient. So how do we teach this critical skill? There is some evidence that using concept mapping can improve clinical reasoning skills. I have used concept mapping in a summer nursing elective I developed with a colleague. The students showed definite improvement in clinical reasoning and the ability to see the bigger picture in patient care. Often our traditional care plans are very linear, focusing on only one or maybe a few issues. Concept maps, on the other hand reveal the relationships between problems giving a broader view of patient care. In the course, my colleague and I used a concept map constructed in Word with multiple text boxes for the students to fill in. For one of my Personal Learning Goals, I am investigating other forms of concept mapping that could be used collaboratively with groups of students. Dr. Smolka suggested I look at Bubbl.us and Cacoo.com. So let's take a look.

The first one I checked out was Bubbl.us  It looked interesting, but I would either have to sign up for a free trial or pay. I've had enough free trials lately, and I certainly didn't want to pay, so I kept looking. I found a great tool in Mindmeister.com  

Not only is the mapping tool easy to use, it has a tutorial to guide you, and a good online help library. It also has some impressive features, like the ability to create a presentation right from your concept map. You can also add pictures, emoticons, and even videos! Another great aspect is the ability to broadcast your map to collaborators, even the ability to set up a team that can work together in real time. Each team member has a different color and can chat with each other as they work. You can also invite other people to view your concept map via email.Your concept map also can be shared to Twitter, published, or even embedded or linked to a website or blog. Here's a link to my first concept map in MindMeister  You can email invitations to view your concept map. You can even add a personal message and decide if they can only view it, or if they can edit. You can also save it as a pdf and if you upgrade ($) you can share presentations. Pretty cool!  

I also checked into Cacoo.com which is free to use.

The concept map itself is more colorful and easier to read, in my opinion. It also has icons you can add, but it is a little hard to figure them out. You can purchase more at the Cacoo store, and I found quite a few that were free. You can also resize them, but the categories are odd. And some icons that are shown in color only come in black and white. Constructing the concept map was a little harder - not quite as user friendly as MindMeister. It also allows collaboration with chat in real time, and you can save your concept maps as pdfs or various other files and can link to URLs. Although you can create presentations, it's hard to figure out how. You can email invitations to people to view your concept map and/or edit it, and it can be published on the web. Here's my first venture with Cacoo using the same topic:

If you want to see it on the Cacoo site then Click Here

And finally, here is my original concept map in Word:

I honestly think it is easier to create and therefore less time is spent on making it pretty and more time understanding the content. I'll have to ask my students, but unless they know how to use Cacoo or MindMeister, it is another technology platform to learn. That being said, Millennials love technology, so maybe that wouldn't be an issue!

Maryanne

Are all ePortfolios created eQual?

The last few days I've been exploring several ePortfolio platforms. Being a techie fan, I love the idea of ePortfolios. I think they are a valuable tool in today's digital world. You can show examples of writing with links to PDFs, embed slideshows, add images, link to presentations, even videos. The content can be organized on different pages for easy navigation. Depending on the platform used, ePortfolios can highlight your creativity as well. That's the fun part!  Some platforms offer different templates geared toward different types of ePortfolios and different styles. You can either drop your artifacts in to a predesigned template or personalize it further using the editing tools.

I had created an ePortfolio using Wix not too long ago. It has numerous templates and allows for a quite a bit of customization. This is the template I edited to create my ePortfolio: template  And here's the link to my ePortfolio: Wix ePortfolio  As you can see I did quite a bit of customizing, but Wix also offers ePortfolio and CV templates you can simply drop your content into. I just like to play around with it. The Wix platform was fairly easy to use and gives lots of choices (almost too many!) if you want to design your own site. They also offer professional design at a cost. Wix provides WixEd which has free videos to help you design your website. Although much of Wix is geared towards business, with a little imagination you can change any template into an ePortfolio. Wix also offers free apps to include in your site, like surveys or Google maps, etc.

The next platform I explored was Weebly. They also have templates you can use, but I just built my ePortfolio from scratch to see how hard it would be. It wasn't bad at all. I like how clean and simple it is compared to the busyness of my Wix ePortfolio. To be fair, I easily could have made that cleaner as well. So here's the link to the Weebly ePortfolio. Weebly also has both free and paid apps, a help center, a blog with recent updates, and more. With Weebly you can also include a blog and a social media stream in your website or ePortfolio. The social media stream is fun! But I didn't like that the logos for social media links were very small with no way to enlarge them. Also, the support page is a bit hard to find, hidden in a drop down menu under your name. Overall, I think Wix and Weebly are comparable - they each have pros and cons. I tried to find another platform, but many charged fees or were just too complicated. Wix and Weebly were by far the most user friendly that I could find.

I planned to find three journal articles that discussed evaluation of professional ePortfolios. However, I could not find much on this topic, but I found a few that related to nursing education and evaluating student ePortfolios. The first article is Electronic portfolios in nursing education: A review of the literature by Green, Wyllie, and Jackson (2014). The authors assert that the process of building an ePortfolio appeals to Millennials, fosters autonomy and accountability for their own learning, and helps link theory to practice (Green, Wyllie, & Jackson, 2014).
I agree with this idea and think that using ePortfolios with students would be a great way for them to learn to build a professional presence as well.

Although I think it would be valuable for students to build ePortfolios, grading them could be challenging. One of the important aspects of ePortfolios noted in the journal article by Green et al. was reflection. Neither Wix nor Weebly had an obvious place for students to reflect on their work. I guess they could use the blog for that, but that would be removed from the actual documents. Norris and Gimber (2013) assert that the process of selecting which documents to put in their ePortfolios is actually a metacognitive process that helps students reflect on what they have learned and use critical thinking to decide which documents would best represent their developing professional persona. With this in mind, perhaps students should blog about how and why they chose artifacts to include in their ePortfolio.

The last article I found reinforced the importance of reflection in the creation of ePortfolios (Gwozdek, Springfield, & Kerschbaum, 2013). The authors emphasize the need to clearly determine the purpose of ePortfolios and to define specific learning outcomes. They include several rubrics, discuss evaluating the impact of ePortfolios, and reflect on lessons learned. The following quote sums up the potential found in ePortfolios:

Both as product and process, reflective ePortfolios have

the potential to promote learning and transfer of knowledge

by fostering the ability to make connections between

learning outcomes (i.e. competencies) and leaning experiences.

3 As repositories of evidence of student work, portfolios

allow learners to take responsibility for documenting

and demonstrating their own abilities over the entire

curriculum. Self-assessment allows learners to consider

this within broader learning domains of their lives 

(Gwozdek et al., 2013, p. e11)

As much as I enjoyed playing with ePortfolios for myself, I think there are even greater rewards in using them to benefit students. With this in mind, I was excited to find the International Journal of ePortfolio  Definitely a resource I will explore.

Maryanne

References:

Green, J., Wyllie, A., & Jackson, D. (2014). Electronic portfolios in nursing education: A review of the literature. Nursing Education in Practice, 14, 4-8.

Gwozdek, A. E., Springfield, E. C., & Kershbaum, W. E. (2013). ePortfolio: Developing a catalyst for critical self-assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes. Allied Health, 42(1), e11-e17.

Norris, M., & Gimber, P. (2013). Developing nursing students' metacognitive skills using social technology. Teaching and Learning in Nursing, 8, 17-21.

Using Camtasia

Another technology platform I'd like to learn more about is Camtasia. I bought this for school and I find it fairly user friendly. One of the things I really like about Camtasia is that I can record specific areas of my screen, so I can record a YouTube video only and leave out the often inappropriate comments people leave. Then I can take that recording and embed it other presentations, like Prezi or Piktochart. It gives the video a clean, uncluttered appearance so the viewer can focus on what I want them to see.

So I know a little about Camtasia, but there is more to learn. Sometimes I get frustrated with it, but more than likely that is related to my tendency
         
              to bypass reading the directions
                        
                                   and instead to just..... 

And now my secret's out! So I decided that since Camtasia has a whole set of Tutorial Videos that maybe I should take a look.  I found quite a few that were interesting. Camtasia Course covers the basics  - most of which I figured out on my own, albeit with some difficulty.  For those who like to read the directions first, these videos are well done and short - about 4 minutes each. There's also Cool Examples which cover some of the finer points, such as using the green screen effect on Macs. This looks really fun. I may play with this idea over the summer. Using the green screen effect allows you to interact with the presentation as if you are in the presentation itself, like this:

Some of the Cool Examples are just written out - no video. There is also information on how to share to iOS and Android devices. This is definitely something I want to explore, since students would be very interested in videos that are mobile friendly. There is also a Trouble shooting section called Common Issues. Finally, there's More Resources that has links to technical support, TechSmith blog, newsletters, the Camtasia product page, and of course the tag for social media. I found an interesting article about building instructor presence in an online course using the video feature of Camtasia. Access the article here.

Another blog caught my eye about using Camtasia to put together a video of recorded clips from students phones. I don't know if Camtasia would have any advantages over iMovie or other video software, but I like the idea of students creating an educational video as a collaborative project. Check out the article here.

Out of curiosity I looked for any journal articles about Camtasia and found one by Carpenter, Theeke, and Smothers (2013) in Nurse Educator entitled Enhancing Course Grades and Evaluations Using Distance Education Technologies. The authors used Camtasia to present course material in the classroom while recording the lecture. They then saved the recording as a podcast that students could upload to their mobile devices. Students appreciated being able to listen and watch lecture over and over. Carpenter, Theeke, and Smothers (2013) assert,

"These contemporary methods not only meet the expectation  of today’s learners, who are comfortable with receiving

and studying information electronically, but also can actually result in improved ratings of teacher effectiveness" (p. 116).  

The authors suggest further research to see how using Camtasia and other similar technologies impact student outcomes. Very interesting!

Lots to think about until next time!

Maryanne