I will propose a session on how to work with technology in the classroom when dealing with students who have low tech skills, which is a big concern of mine heading into fall 2011. How do you handle students who don’t even know how to use even the most basic word processing fundamentals? What kind of websites or apps aide you in helping students? A big question I am concerned about is how this differs from the university to state school to community college level. What can we do as educators to prepare our students for a work force that will require them to know how to use computers?
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It occurs to me that this might overlap in productive ways with the proposed Working With With Students Who Have Low Technology Skills panel.
Working at a museum in a small liberal arts college, I often find it more challenging to work with the faculty who have low technology skills. We are very committed in the museum to using technology but the majority of ourbstaff is not tech saavy so it often falls to two of us. We see digital technology having amazing potential to explore collections, exhibition ideas and to provide a new platform for students and faculty to conduct research. I’m trying to focus our efforts on using free applications that don’t require special programming skills such as google earth, blogging, Facebook, flickr, and mobile apps that are built by plugging in content such as tours here, my tours, or toura. Our students are building their first virtual exhibitions by plugging content into a Wix website template. I hope to try out History Pin and Voicethread in the futur. We are really just in the beginning stages of implementation of all of this. My approach is to find easy to use and free applications, which allow students and faculty to focus on the content and designing the overall experience.
Please pardon my typos. I am using a touch keyboard which I am still getting used to :
Often, I encounter this problem with high school students and young adults attending local colleges. I’d like to see what is the best of the free applications to use and whether or not instruction should occur in an individual setting or group setting.
I’d like to attend this. Maureen–agreed, there is a dual problem: students and faculty. Where I am, students are required to take a tech literacy course if they can’t place out, but when they move onto more advanced academic classes, some faculty insist that they use print resources (or worse–they can’t clearly communicate to students what types of electronic resources are credible, because they themselves don’t really get it).
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