Technology in its various manifestations looms ever larger in our lives – & that includes education. For example, many schools require their students to have laptops or – more recently – ipads. I’ve wondered previously whether this is done for a particular pedagogical reason, or whether it’s more a case of "the technology’s there – let’s use<\/i> it!" <\/p>\n
All this does rather assume that students are fairly tech-savvy: something along the lines of "they’ve grown up with all this stuff, so of course they’ll know how to use it." Yes?<\/p>\n
Well, no. this was recently brought home to me as I went through the responses to a survey a couple of colleagues & I carried out recently, looking at student use of the lecture-capture technology Panopto. One of our questions asked how they viewed recorded lectures, & as prompts offered ‘computer’ and ‘i-pod\/mp3 player’. (I put this one in because that’s often how I<\/i> view them.)<\/p>\n
Most of the students chose ‘computer’. Very few chose ‘i-pod’. And some commented plaintively that they would have used i-pods if they’d known that option was available. Now, there’s a link on the Panopto page for my class that gives the option of downloading recordings in mp3 (sound only) or mp4 format (lecture + pictures). I’d made the mistake of assuming that because a relative technological illiterate like me (hey, it doesn’t take much tech knowledge to blog!) knew what to do, my students would to.<\/p>\n
So next semester, "show them how to access recordings" is high on the list of Things To Do on the first day of class \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Seriously, though, I think it’s important that teachers realise that students may not actually be all that familiar with some of the learning technologies that we expect them to make use of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Technology in its various manifestations looms ever larger in our lives – & that includes education. For example, many schools require their students to have laptops or – more recently – ipads. I’ve wondered previously whether this is done for a particular pedagogical reason, or whether it’s more a case of "the technology’s there – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[40],"yoast_head":"\n