For more than 15 plus years, I’ve been using technology in my teaching.
Granted, when I started it out it involved quite a basic discussion forum to be used by my students to reflect on a practical class that involved them producing a professional portfolio.
And in 2003, I was given the chance to teach my students who to design and create their own websites as budding online journalists.
Great! But Web 2.0 had not yet happened and there was no such thing as a smartphone.
So this involved me traipsing off to London to learn HTML and then I taught myself Dreamweaver so we could actually create the websites from scratch.
We have all come a long way since then.
I was fortunate enough to find that as my subject of Journalism went through what we talked about as a ‘blurring of boundaries’ (i.e. that print and text became merged with video and audio), that multimedia could also be incorporated into teaching and learning experiences.
And so, I became an early adopter of technology in my subject area and also, in the weird and wonderful science of pedagogy (the method and practice of teaching).
Since those early days I have used technology to make my teaching more interactive (also known as ‘active learning’) and more interesting for my students.
And as a result, it has become way more interesting for me as a facilitator of learning.
Even five years ago I was asked to lead on an online course and when asked about the course materials I was presented with a 300 plus page PDF document and was told ‘there you go’.
It was an easy challenge for me to signpost different aspects of the course and to add in audio and video (as well as some text) to make it way more ‘easy’ for the students to engage with too!
Since then I have taken on a role that involves not only teaching others, but also providing training to professionals at a world-leading university, and am applying my extensive experience of course design to teach others the art of developing courses of their own in a range of specialisms.
And in the last couple of years in the wider world beyond academia, creative entrepreneurs have also got the online learning bug and have ventured into the world of online courses.
Much of the focus here however, I have observed, is on marketing NOT on course design for a quality learning experience.
Teachknology aims to address this gap.
And of course we cannot ignore the 19 in 2020, that is Covid-19.
School children, students, teachers, lecturers, and parents, were thrown into the world of online learning whether they liked it or not.
Granted, great strides were made in a short time but the lack of preparation time for this forced transition meant that there is still more work to be done to improve the experience for everyone involved.
And we cannot take for granted that all schools, colleges and universities, will be back full-time.
We need to keep an eye on the possibilities of remote learning, for ourselves and for the future of education, as well as for future generations.
Teaching and learning with technology is not going away, whether we like it or not, so we might as well as embrace it and see all of the wonderful ways we can use it to our advantage.