Blended Learning
A lot of my digital skills were honed in thanks to Bryn Mawr’s launch of the Digital Competencies Program. As a student, I was provided with incredible opportunities and structure to build my own projects. So today, as an Educational Technologist, working on the other end, I help students articulate and develop their Digital Skills through workshops, in-class consulting and one-on-one appointments. In addition to helping faculty and staff to blend technology into their teaching.
Blended Learning consists of assisting faculty, staff, and students to incorporate technology into their learning and teaching. This is a fairly broad description to a fairly broad field, add this to the multidisciplinary aspect of Liberal Arts College and a superstar team and what you get is never having the same two days of work.
Due to the nature of my position, I wear several hats that spark joy (within me at least :P). In addition to providing tech support to community members for all Ed Tech services (e.g. Microsoft 365 services, Domain of One’s Own, Tegrity, Hardware…), I also get asked for help with:
Focus Areas:
Website Consulting:
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Yes, yes and let me show you!Hey can you help me get started with building a website?”. “Ummm can you help me turn this into a professional portfolio?”. “How do I make my website multilingual?”
Using Domain of One’s Own – which is the web hosting tool Bryn Mawr subscribes to – I assist community members to design the website of their dreams. That can include anything from choosing a web publishing tool that can help them best convey their message, to making sure their final product is accessible!
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Instructional Design:
“How to make my last assignment digital?” Can you help me incorporating tech into my class? “Hey, could you stop by and explain my students how [insert tech here] works?”
Can you tell me more about it? What do you want your students to get from your class? And of course!
After talking with the faculty and determining what the learning goals of the assignment are, I can help shape what the assignment would/could look like. Depending on the class, I develop assistive materials, perform in-class instruction sessions, or have one-on-one appointments with students and the faculty member.
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Hosting Webinars:
This was one of my very first assignments! I train faculty and staff on how to host webinars using Skype For Business (we’re a Microsoft 365 school). I also served as tech support – oftentimes bilingual – during webinars to help participants outside of our network troubleshoot. I also stepped in as a “substitute host” for an international webinar of a BMC faculty and Chilean organizations. You can read a bit about my webinar advice here!
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Data everything:
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What do you currently have and what do you want it to look like? Sure, how much time are you willing to spend on it and how often do you need to do this? Tell me more about this dataset!Hey how do I clean this thing faster?”, “Can you help me turn this data from this into that?”, “What information can we get out of this?”
This is probably one of my favorite things ever! Whether it’s helping my team track and evaluate its own programs, assisting other departments to display their analysis results in an eye-catching way, or even
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Marketing:
Lastly, to promote library services and events, I dabble as an Instagrammer and ‘graphic designer’. They call me a meme queen. JK no one calls me that. I’m just another Brazilian who knows how to leverage my love for inside jokes by combining it with actionable information.
Past Projects:
Praxis Poster into e-Portfolio:
Collaborating with Prof. Jim Martin, Faculty Advisor of the Promoting Change Thru Service Praxis Seminar and Kelly Strunk Praxis Assistant Director, we transformed the seminar’s Poster Session into a Portfolio website showcasing. That way we could introduce the Digital Competencies Framework to the student cohort, support them in developing the necessary Web Skills and have them create something that they could take with them to interviews and future application processes.
In this particular project, I introduced the DigiComp framework, helped scaffold the final assignment to fit the existing syllabus as well as helped with the full process of website creation and design. I’ve assisted both Prof. Martin and his students in the technical aspects of creating a website, in thinking critically about their privacy, and in designing their website and planning their content based on their target audience.
Here is a screenshot of the finalized website as of May 2019.
Visit: http://praxisjam.digital.brynmawr.edu