Digital Natives = Digital Experts?

The different approaches of Mark Prensky and Professor Susan Bennett towards the term 'digital native' and their understandings of it show that there does not exist a common sense when it comes to the meaning of the term. Some people, such as Prensky, think that 'digital natives' are any people being born into the digital age and the age of technologies. Others, such as Bennett, are of the opinion that only those who know to use the variety of existing digital tools in a reasonable and useful way and can, thus, be seen as 'digital experts' should be called 'digital natives'.

(For more information, watch the videos below!)

Reflection on Teaching with Technologies

I reflected on teaching with technologies in FL classroom settings. You can listen to this reflection by clicking on the following link:

Voice Reflection

I am sorry for the non-optimal quality of the recording, I had a long cold and needed to finish the various parts of this e-portfolio. I decided to solely include this voice reflection into the e-portfolio and to leave the Talking Head Video from the tutorial IT05 aside because there would have been the same information included twice.

Trying Something New: My First Own Podcast

One part of the assessment in the context of the proPIC project was to present our personal (research) results in a creative and yet digital way. We were very free in our choices and so I decided to record a podcast in which I would present my (research) results and the progress I made during the project.

In order to prepare myself I read some research articles on what to think of when producing podcasts. After that, I structured my thoughts by taking notes about what I was going to say in my podcast. I subdivided that into four parts (an introduction, a short outline of my research methods, the research results, and recommendations based on the research results). In the end I found myself a title for the podcast: How to Use E-Learning Tools to Foster Student Participation and an Understanding of Democratic Forms of Communication. Then I decided on a programme to record and edit my podcast. I chose the free software Audacity (www.audacity.de) and watched some introductory videos on YouTube about using that programme. After that I started recording and editing my podcast.

All in all, I can say that I had a lot of fun in recording and editing the podcast even though it took way longer than I had previously thought. Audacity is a rather complex but, nevertheless, good and useful programme for recording and editing podcasts. Keeping in mind that it is a free programme, which has all the functions necessary to produce a high quality podcast, this time and work effort is perfectly worth it.