Collaborative work
As the third week of the course comes to an end, I am reflecting on the Focuses of our group discussions: Policies and Digital literacy.
- what are teachers allowed to use in their teaching?
- What define us (teachers and students) as digitally literate?
- How can the fear of using new IT tools be overcome?
The idea was for each member of tour group to individually Investigate and Share our ideas/findings on a digital white board called Flinga.
Flinga is a collaborative platform with integrated, engaging, and pedagogical activities. I am familiar with the tool. I use it as a platform for (I) evaluating my students knowledge on some topics ahead of a course, (I) learn about my student’s expectations on the course they are about to take, or (II) as a feedback page during/after the courses I teach. The platform registers all answers/ideas in a completely anonymous way (unless you write down your name). It is easy to use, colorful, and every time I have set a white board, my students have been highly active on it.
ONL- group 5’s working white board for the second topic of the course
For ONL, the white board was set up such that we could share ideas on our three study focuses (above picture). The white board was left blank for quite sometime, before being filled of ideas as group members were gathering information. As explain below, I retain two main points from this group work.
Policies
No institution has a clear list of what IT platforms, software or tools, their teachers should and should NOT use in their teaching. However institutions often provide clear rules about using personal information or images for their teaching. If using IT, we should always do it while following the ‘General Data Protection Regulation‘. This means: do not use any tool that store personal information, do not store personal information without consent of the student(s), do not use image without consent, do not use image without associated license.
Using Flinga (or Padlet, which is similar) is thus not a problem: the platform is anonymous and work on voluntary participation.
Using Zoom (previous blog post) might pose a problem as students and teachers might have to enter some personal details to create an account and join a meeting. However, at least at Lund University, students and teachers can register to Zoom via their University account, and thus the University is the ‘personal data collector’ protecting both students’ and teachers’ personal data.
Digital literacies
Digital literacy is seen very differently between people. Most likely based on their various personal experiences with different tools, either inside or outside the classroom. Thus, as Doug Belshow actually puts it in his book , we should not talk about digital literacy but rather about digital literacies! …TBC
