1. Description of Competency

As a part of building an effective learning environment, adapting technology in the classroom is necessary to advance students' learning. The technology an instructor can utilize is not limited to only computational technology. Finding and applying technologies involves technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and content knowledge.

2. Artifact(s)

To apprehend how to adapt technology in the classroom, I attended the workshop for certification in the college teaching institute on May 9th, 2019. The workshop covered how to cultivate effective learning environments by promoting student success and engagement and creating inclusive learning spaces. You can find the workshop materials here (schedule and agenda, worksheet for the session addressing technology in teaching).

3. Artifact(s) Rationale

The workshop was designed to build around experiences in and demonstration of learning in five competency areas including incorporating technology in teaching. The topic included: multimedia, distance learning, hybrid courses, and video technologies.

4. Interpretation and Reflection

In the workshop, we were required to create an activity using technology while specifying the learning objectives and learning contexts as an instructor. Our group's objective was "at the end of the learning activity, students will be able to demonstrate a concept of credibility and identify what a credible source is." We designed an activity using Twitter. In the activity, instructors would ask students to find tweets related to a relevant topic for the class. For instance, in health communication class, students would find tweets regarding how to cure cancer. Then, students would be required to list the source of the tweets and the characteristics of tweets (e.g., evidence-based or emotional, whether they are authorities or not, and how many times the tweet has been retweeted) and evaluate their credibility.

Many students use social media in their life. A previous study (Vosoughi et al., 2018) found that fake news spreads faster than true news on Twitter. It is an essential skill for students to distinguish between fake and true news. Understanding the concept of credibility could help them to build this essential skill-set. This activity would help them not only to apply the concept of credibility in their real life but also to make them more interested in and more engaged in learning.

Through this activity, I found that building a specific learning objective is more important than just using technology itself. Still, it is challenging for instructors to utilize technologies in a classroom while not distracting students. Often, allowing students to use their mobile or laptops distracts them from learning. This is another reason why building a specific learning objective is important. I believe that sharing a specific goal (e.g., what to do) for students and limiting time for the activity might help students to concentrate on the activity.

While teaching, I have tried to apply what I learned from this workshop and activity. For instance, when I taught the methodology class, it was necessary for students to memorize the basic concepts related to statistics in learning a quantitative methodology. I set a specific goal for students such that students could retrieve the concepts related to descriptive statistics; I created and provided the Quizlet for students to help them to practice retrieval (you can see the example here).