SUNY Exploring Emerging Technologies for Lifelong Learning and Success (#EmTechMOOC)
and you are all set thank you very much Chris and uh thank you to Sunni Oar for giving us an opportunity to share information about the State University of New York's exploring emerging Technologies for lifelong learning and success um the URL for our project is on the screen and it's pretty memorable it's Sunni doedu mte and that's EMT e CH and we will talk about the project and um give you some examples and show you around so um without further Ado we're gonna go forward so my name is Robin Sullivan if you need to find me at the University at Buffalo directories you do need to look me up as Roberta but everybody knows me as Robin I am a teach teaching and learning strategist with the um New linked Center in the University at Buffalo libraries my email address is on the screen it's RRS buffalo.edu and I've been an instructional designer with the University of Buffalo for about 25 years and um this project has been a collaboration with many people from around the Sunni system one person who has been extremely instrumental and we are hoping that she is going to kind of take the Reign and move us forward even further is Dr Nicole Simon and Nicole can you please introduce yourself sure thank you Robin hi I'm Nicole Simon from Sun nasau Community College I um am a stem professor in the engineering physics technology section of the math department I've been teaching at Nassau in various capacities between stem inst structional design for over 20 years and I'm construction designer and an ntech specialist as well I've been with the mtech project for many years both as a fellow and now the other side of the house and we're very excited to show you what we've been working on over the years great thank you so kind of the gist of the mtech project is that in today's rapidly changing technology World there are many many voices um there's icons on the screen of just a fraction of those that you have that are um freely available technology tools that can assist with teaching learning and with your everyday life um this selection of tools is ever growing Ever Changing they are all you know just a little bit D different in their purpose and also in the quality and one of the big questions that we need to be able to solve today is how do we know as faculty researchers students members of society how do we know which are the best tools and resources to choose it's kind of the heart of the mtech project for short we um call the project mtech um it has two different parts the mtech moo and the mtech wiki and we will talk about both of them today mtech is is Discovery learning to be able to explore and reflect on Innovative and creative uses of emerging Technologies and the learning opportunity that mtech presents is available to anybody anybody in today's world across the globe who has an interest to stay current with today's rapidly changing Technologies it was designed with instructors and college students in mind and and it's suited for both beginners and advanced level users I mentioned that mtech has two Associated Parts one of those parts is mtech moo and that is an online course provided through corsera and the course provides a very structured and supportive opportunity to learn about all the various changing emerging Technologies you see on the screen the interface for corsera it looks very much like the learning management system that many of you are are very familiar with there's often a menu of content and there are interactive activities quizzes um some games and um also a few videos the corsera course for mtech is a little bit light on um some of the video presentation it we frame it more as a constructivist opportunity you may make the course what you want it to be and help um it helps you meet the needs of your specific objectives um I also mentioned that this course or or the mtech project has been created by many individuals from across the Sunni system many of you may recognize Chris price the um academic programs manager with Sunni CPD he is just one of the guest lecturers in the course um we also have faculty and students from across the Sunni system who are in the course providing information about how and why you might use the different types of emerging Technologies for the purpose of teaching and learning the mtech course is um structured into five different modules it is is not a really heavy lift it's professional development so it's optional um some faculty have Incorporated it into course assignments so in that case they have made it required for their specific students but the course is organized into five different modules the very first module is all about lifelong learning and the for Seas of 21st century skills the topic of this conference Sunni oar is you know oar is one of the concepts that is covered in that first module it's one of the ideas that you need to understand to be able to move forward and be able to create Oar find Oar and um use it for your own purposes um that first module is a little bit on the heavier side compared to the other modules that follow the four C's of 21st century skills those are communication collaboration creativity and critical thinking and the um for Seas of 21st century skills is something that has been developed through through the um um National Education Association and they have decided that these are the four skills that employers are most seeking in the people that they employ in their organizations Nicole I'm G to let you take it from here for a bit sure so we take a look at where we get all of the Vital Information and the emerging technology tools to be used in the moo we have our mtech Wiki which is the second half of this project it's a socially curated Wiki repository of freely available and premium tools and resources we use the mtech um Wiki to really help out with the discovery exercises in the moo to be able to find and cury and really hone down our skill set as to what we're looking for as far as merging Technologies and certainly learn and explore new ones it's an open website it's freely available you can use it as a standalone resource or you can again use it in conjunction was designed to with the moo I know myself and some colleagues at Nassau we have actually used the wiki as its own minicourse so rather than have the students do the full moo during the semester we will actually use each of the different four learning modules from the wiki and curate that information and design it specific to our courses so when we talk about the wiki what are we actually looking at well as you can see on the screen the four major modules of learning lifelong learning communication collaboration creativity and critical thinking you can certainly click on any of those and it will curate the emerging Technologies in that field or you can actually use the filters and that's really the heart of the wiki is using those filters to be able to take a look at different objectives what are you or your students looking to find learn about as different resources in the course or you can actually go through the different cataloges and that further reinds your searches to be able to again make the best of our wow 600 plus we're almost up to different tools and resources so you can see that we have so many different records and how do you even begin again taking a look at what your true objective is for your students for what you want them to learn about or to use and then certainly by those different categories start to take a look we have many many different categories that will go back to those mod modules specifically the opened resources these are great areas to learn about open education resources to be able to take a look and find newer ones that you can use for your classes your students are probably aware of what the acronym is but really actually using it it's a little bit more involved we want to make sure our students have the best possible information we invite you to contribute to the wiki we can't find all the different resources out there so again it's open so anybody can contribute all you need to do is log on to the wiki and create um an account and then from there you can always contribute whether you find a tool a resource a video anything would be wonderful and then we just go in and just double check to make sure that the filters are applied correctly that you actually putting in the right category because we do keep the taxonomy a little bit clean to make sure that everybody is able to again use that search function the best of its ability you can always add a tool if you find a broken link or if you're finding something as an issue we welcome you to help modify it and if possible rate the tool our rating system isn't as highly developed as the rest of the wiki because not everybody rates the tool some of us just you know yes or no or just ignore it but we certainly want you to help rate the tool that way we know what is being used the most and what is the most helpful for you so there's a learning process with everything but more than the just learning process we want you to read and review or participate with the course materials again going back to the moo and using the wiki along with that explore the wiki and the tools and resources again to help you complete those Discovery exercises and really learn about the course and emerging Technologies I'd like to say it's customizable we do have a framework but when you're completing your discover exercises or your students if you want to enroll them it really helps that you have a theme of what you're looking for with those tools and resources it may be open educational resources it may be allowing students to find out more about that with images or helping to create those pedagogical Partnerships where students are part of the learning process with open education certainly sharing an artifact of what you've created what you've found and then reflecting on that in a new portfolio while the eort portfolio is technically um an option we do encourage you to use that feature because now students can start to create a living document of their learning and they can use this cross discipline and being able to find out how to create any portfolio and then sharing it is really value added in this course and then also certainly there's a reward of earning the badges in the course s certificate so some of the learner rewards creating that personal e portfolio some of us do it more for professional reasons I have certainly many of them for professional I have ones that are just for fun to show some of the tools and resources I've learned about and then you can certainly customize it for your students I know my students use it for their disciplines whether they are in the stem fields or the Art Fields and they need to show digital portfolio or if they're going in for education but another wonderful thing is to be able to use it for a final project where you can break got segment what they've learned and build on it certainly earning the course eror certificate and the soony digital badges are very highly valued for professional development and for student personal gain and then there's always the intrinsic reward of being a life learner so some of what we've been working on over the past couple of years is the wiki taxonomy improvements making sure our keywords and our tagging structure is very robust and also that we have a lot of choices for people to go through and take a look at different special interest groups such as virtual exchange and coil I'm an avid coiler and um coil coordinator for my campus so being able to make sure that things are workable internationally not just with gdpr and fpo regulations but also making sure that we're mindful of bandwidth and we're mindful of what different countries can use which software and emerging Technologies and tools making sure that different instructors are able to use those different tools specifically the K12 sector New York State and California have an ed law where they are very mindful of what technology tools and emerging technology we are allowed to use with our K12 Partners so making sure that they are tagged properly so the K12 sector can come in and readily use these resources making sure we uphold the standards for accessibility security and certainly Global availability have been the improvements we've been working on so mtech is free for all everyone can participate in the course for free that's always been open for everybody Sunni anybody who's a student staff faculty or alumni can join and get a free cors era certificate in batch but recently New York State Department of Labor has allowed anyone who is underemployed to be able to to get a free Corsair certificate in badge all you have to do is apply and other states are starting to bring this to fruition as well making this more of an O available course for students and for Learners the Wiki's always been freely available for everybody but there are also many more promotional offerings you can always find on corsera what we're trying to do is build that 24 25st Century digital literacy skills that are so crucial for displaced workers underserved population and those with low incomes well thank you um and so that kind of gives you just you know a little bit of an overview about the um the Sunni mtech project and we're going to talk a little bit about some of the categories um that you can find on the mtech wiki that you use in conjunction with the M so I am going to actually go into the mtech website excuse me and um so this is the mtech website it has um been evolving for many years it was um kind of the the thread that started all of this was one of the very first Sunni Innovative instruction technology grants back in 2012 we had a project that was uh followed this a similar model called the tools of Engagement project that has um evolved over time for the first five years it was mainly focused just at faculty and um as we were going forward we always knew that the students needed to have digital skills as well and we were hoping to provide professional development for faculty and have them trickle down their knowledge to students and that definitely did happen but we did want to make the project globally available to um instructors across the world and also to students as we were going through we said well you know everybody needs to have good digital literacy skills and so we kind of reframed the model and rebranded it as the Sunni mtech project and and um always continually making improvements we have a survey that is provided to participants as they go through the course and after they complete the course and we are always looking at the data trying to figure out what we can do to make this a better experience for everyone involved um one of the very latest experiences that um we've done to improve the project is we have moved from the University at Buffalo servers to the Sunni create system Ed you're on the call I want to thank you very much for your assistance um and Sunni Oar and Sunni for their assistance in making the transition um the Sunni create process was very easy and um we have you know one of the really great things is that we've been able to modify the URL that is now a sticky URL throughout the project um I think the URL that we gave at the beginning Sunni doedu mtech and the URL that you see on my browser right now m.s. edu they will both work and they will keep consistent throughout the site um so this is the homepage of mtech Wiki and if you're interested to explore this resource you have your two options so you can go either directly into the corsera course um if you have a Sunni email address you can um enroll with your Sunni email and then that will allow you to enroll in the course and also earn the free corsera certificate and free Sunni digital badges you can also choose if you do not um if you do not have any association to Sunni you can enroll directly through cor sah um you can take the entire course everybody in the world can take the entire course at no cost if you don't pay the course fee right now that um we recently raised that to a $49 fee um and that is only necessary if you are not part of the Sunni system and you ALS also wish to get the corsera certificate and the Sunni digital badge which is very beneficial to post on your LinkedIn profile on the portfolio that you will hopefully develop through the discovery exercises throughout the modules and um so it's a employers are starting to recognize these credentials much more um many times you know many employers may not know what a digital badge is they may not know what a moo is um we're actually um getting away from the term moo because it's just an online course happens to have quite a bit of enrollments which makes it a massive open online course um so you can go into cor sah um if you happen to be an alumni of Sunni and no longer have your um Sunni email address if you're no longer you know I don't if I retire and I don't have my buffalo.edu address um I can still go to the FAQ page and there's instructions just to send an email in that shows that you are an alumni of the Sunni system or one of the course um official Partners such as our coil faculty Partners or students if you can just show some kind of evidence that you are officially connected with Sunni in some capacity we will allow you to get that certificate and badge at no cost um on the right side of the screen um you see the button and the icon that lets you discover the mtech wiki and you can also directly from this menu at the top just navigate over to the wiki um the picture that we had in our slides was just a blowup version of this screen and so when you first come to the Discover page um as Nicole said you can navigate directly to one of the four um C's uh communication and collaboration is module two so if you were in the corsera course in module two and you were going through the discovery exercises it would then point you back to the wiki and it would take those um 600 resources um we started out with 150 and it would take those 600 resources and now it's saying okay so 500 of them can help you if you're trying to improve your communication and collaboration you can then keep loading more um but if you say well I you know my objective is to uh communicate with other people or help my students communicate with others so I want to narrow this down even further so I'm going to choose communicate with others from the menu and it then starts filtering it down even further down to 243 um you can see these rating options and um so s more happens to be a newsletter um creation tool so if you needed to create a newsletter you can come here and say oh this is some more then as part of the course you would create an account in this um resource create a newsletter doesn't have to be one that you're really going to send out but many times people are using these tools for actual applications to their everyday life and then if you decide that it is something that you value you can just click the up button if it's something that you think is not very valuable to people's needs you can down rate it um so as Nicole mentioned we are trying to improve the rating system and um you make it a little bit more noticeable we had a graphic design intern from a coil course in Venezuela who has helped us redesign the front page and our rating system and we now have a new um student programmer who is in the process of reimplementing that design in the Sunni create server um which is you just a little bit more streamlined than the web apps pod container system that we were um kind of locked into using at the University of Buffalo since we had some of the um um programming that would help with the Sorting process in the tools and so um one other way that you can um sort the sort or search through is through categories so if you decide that well I know that I want my students to explore video and that is one of the more um popular categories out of all of these I we have um maybe about 20 different categories so if you wanted them to explore video to communicate and collaborate you can narrow down further um and um you know if you decide Well Screen castify is the one that I'm interested in or you can look further um and hit film is another freely and that's something I don't think we stress enough all of the tools that are in the wiki are freely available technology tools and resources we have one or two exceptions um to that if for example Blackboard collaborate when Sunni was a Blackboard campus it was one that we had um kept on the site even though it was not free um since it was a a a resource that many people at Sunni were using we did include a mention about that as well um also in the category section we have an essential tool boox um so that would be um tools that um you know you might know of and refer um so Ted Ed is one of the really great resources and um also um so it's actually showing me all of the video and the essential tools right now so um I can kind of narrow down a little bit further and also so if you are brand new to Tech um we had some faculty tell us um that um you know 600 tools is just way overwhelming too much of a fire hose so if you are just new to Tech you can you know reset your search options and you can only choose that category and say I'm new to technology show me some of the basics um some of the um you know just I'm thinking that I got a glitch here somewhere um so we're going to have to check our programming on there but some of the new to Tech would show up um at in that category and we will definitely check on that um so and um Moren thank you for asking the question how is privacy addressed across these tools and accessibility that is definitely something that we are working on and um just to show you um our kind of manual process right now on how we are handling that um we have about 50 of the tools that are currently um that are currently evaluated um again we had some students from coil who helped us go through and um we tried to aim at the ones that were used quite often um top hat is a classroom response system that um we have a it's not very noticeable right now but we have the re link on the page to review the accessibility and the security information right now it is a manual process and we are um going into um a spreadsheet that is linked to from uh the wiki and I can go in and I can find the record for Top [Music] Hat um top hat and so here's the information about Top Hat um that you can say um you know our alt tags provided and and able to be added for pictures does the app use color to convey meaning does it solely rely on color no it doesn't and there's um a form that people can fill out to evaluate these pretty much everything that goes through if you add a resource to the wiki or to this um app review checklist we will review it again before we make it live and um this is something that right now the evaluation part is a manual process we did submit uh recent Sunni iitg Grant to um pay for the programming that would allow us to um programmatically connect the evaluation and add that rating system and also make the course a little um more available and unfortunately we are still searching for some funding if anybody has any ideas on um how we can approach that we are always looking for partners with this um Sunni m project so please connect with us and the good news is that the newer resources the newer records we are reviewing before we put them in um but like Robin said the older ones it is manual process we started out with our rating system and use that to identify the most widely used again if not everybody's reading our tools it's a little bit tricky we've also taken a look um at the New York Ed law and taking a look at the K12 sector of what theyve vetted and used that as a Clearing House going through all the Bose center going through every single District that was my project during the pandemic to to see and and start to curate that information across the state and cross reference to see what are they recommending the most and I do notice there's a couple um comments in the chat um one of the questions um was is there a resource that is similar to near that allows a student to follow along a presentation on their screen and be directed to the links and I do believe um that uh Google may have an option to do something similar to near pod we do have nearpod in the collection and um I might have to look further to see um Nicole do you have any ideas um a resource that's similar to near pod that we have included already um I would say Google would probably be the best because they're been coming out with newer ones but nearpod you can certainly use nearpod works very well um and thank you Chris for addressing we will share the slides um and Nicole before we do that some of the links we're pointing to our big ugly URLs instead of our new Sunni create URLs we'll just make sure to update that before we share them um so here's just um I think we're getting uh pretty close to time Chris we got like what time did we go till just want to kind of do a Time 55 I believe okay so we're getting um a little close on time so I'm going to kind of skip some of these examples and we can always go back to the wiki after pull them up and show you around um but when you get the slides you can also check these are some examples um Ed puzzle is um um you know just um Nicole can you quickly talk about the examples and then we'll just kind of move forward and come back here edpuzzle is a wonderful resource um it is premium meaning that you can get the free version or you can pay to upgrade I've been using it for community in collaboration with my face to face my filing online my remote and my Blended classes it allows students to collaborate it's great to sit down and use as a review or springboard to launch a topic you can either use pre-made videos or what I like to do certainly during the pandemic most of us had to make a lot of videos for our students I use it in a stem field to make work problem sets and then use it as quizzes for students so it gives them that ability to do a little bit of um review work padlet what can I say um those of you who know me know I'm a huge padlet user and I know it's very overused you have certainly a lot more options like the will Jam board but a great space for students to collaborate and to be able to take that information and kind of take it with them where they can download it they can use it certainly online and we want to make sure that students are really engaged in the active learning process and Moren thanks for that teachable moment in the chat um you just read that jam board is going away y yeah I do remember reading that recently and this is when we would now go to the wiki and just simply log in you know go to the contribute option and um I have the ability to do the big delete um other people could go to the wiki hit the delete button and then it would go live after the mtech team agrees that it is something that should be delet it and uh yes unfortunately it was a great one but that's the idea that we're trying to solve with this tool things change you need to know instead of saying oh my go that's going away what am I gonna do now say it's going away how am I going to change my knowledge to apply the basic principles of what I learned using that tool to something new and improv that it has replaced it so thank you very much um so um we did have um just an explore and share exercise that we want to encourage everyone when you are done with the Sunni Oar conference um please come back to the mtech website explore one or more of the tools tutorials or resources that meet your specific learning objectives and then um if you do not wish to log in the corsera course um please go in and share a reflection through social media just say that I was you know exploring the mtech site found this source and this is why or why it does not or why it does meet my specific needs and how you might be using it and sharing maybe the artifacts that you create um we mentioned kind of at the beginning that it's uh mtech is an oar that helps to create Oar and we do want to also mention that at the end of October we will be launching a partnership with uh Ukraine um they had reached out and Tony had Tony de Franco had shared a message through the Sunni engage platform that they were looking to reopt um open education resources for the purpose of sharing them with their um community that are right now dealing with um you know many hardships due to the war situation and so we have helped them translate the course um using Li you know human translators it is available through their system and we will be promoting that um to their country um in a very short while the course has also been um automatically translated into 20 different languages on the corsera platform and um just going to kind of quickly go I see that we are running quickly low on time um this is a page on the site that shows our impact and I will bring you there if we have some time but actually um we have about 10 users to go to hit that 35,000 Mark so please help us do that today um 34 35,000 um individuals from across the world have registered and enrolled in the mtech course big contingents are from Sunni since they are the ones that have sponsored the program um also India Mexico Singapore it has flooded through their Civil Service we've had all of the um the instructors who train their firemen and policemen and Civil Service going through thanks Chris for the note um we do have a page that's linked to from the about section of the website that has resources that you can share with your campus Flyers small takeaways um digital videos that you can send through email announcements that you can grab and change um and just one last call please we need some more help um this is a big project and we want to continue to improve it so there is a call for Partnerships again under the about menu um Chris is also one of our wonderful fellows on Sunni mtech along with um others that I see on the call and um so I'm gonna you just kind of leave just a couple minutes for questions comments thank you very much for your time and attention today and I I would encourage anybody to unmute if you have a question um you can also if you prefer to put them into the chat um and um and yeah add um thank you edtech or your edtech students love Jam board so yeah if there's um some opportunities um to figure out other options for that that would be great questions or comments so Robin I'm a a jam board user myself when I got the email that announced that Jam board was going away there were some options in there I thought I don't know if you've gotten it or not but if you haven't I can forward you the email that I received forward it yeah and I would encourage um if there's any that you have looked at that look interesting please go right into the wiki and go to that contribute menu and um you know please also um you know feel free to add the resource yourself and we would be very thankful if you could do that I have a list of probably about a thousand links that um it's really easy for me to make a bookmark I just hit the little you know star on my browser and I got a bookmark um contributing to the wiki does take a step or two more not too many you do have to create a separate account and then um it's a WordPress website that just lets you create um a new resource you don't need to know HTML or anything like that um very wisy wig to add uh new resource to the wiki so please if you have a minute um help us out by doing that and Nicole do you have any closing comments I think we are at our time here absolutely explore the wiki please feel free to use it with your classes in part or in whole um share the moo for students to enroll it is great for new instructors to be able to learn a lot more tools to bring to your students it is fantastic for students to be able to get out of the rut of using the same tools that they've been using in k12 and just really wonderful opportunity to be part of a Community Practice to kind of spark your imagination on different projects and different things you can bring to your classes thank you thank you very much thank you for this opportunity thank you everybody for joining us today
2023-10-19 22:26
