Digital tools act in all sorts of unpredicatable ways in our educational ecosystems, so I’m not going to tell you what’s good practice or best practice. Instead let me say something about two tools that have worked for me in the context of some of my teaching.

The first of these tools is blogging. I first used blogging when it was the assessment that ran through the first course of the excellent MSc in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. The participants when I was teaching were mostly adult professionals working in fields that had digital education practices. In that context, the blog let me have an ongoing conversation with participants about their thinking, which works really well for building deep and nuanced understanding. The capacity for participants to make links within and beyond their blogs and for me to easily share links also helped. Blogging also allows for multimodal communication which is an important skill and can make assessed blogs more inclusive for participants less comfortable with formal academic writing. I’ve since also used blogging successfully in my educational development work with academics. In both of these contexts I think it was key that the blog was core to the assessment, rather than an add-on, or these busy professionals wouldn’t have had time to engage. It’s also really important that tutors and other students comment regularly on the blog posts and engage with the progression of thinking over time.

The second tool is Miro. This platform lets you easily set out lots of different types of content on the same board and make patterns of links between content. It also makes it easy for participants to add comments and edit. I first saw this used by my colleague James Lamb on the first course of the Education Futures Programme in the Edinburgh Futures Institute. One of the things I really liked was when James posted the pages of an academic article to the board and had students add comments all over it. This allowed for rich, shared and nuanced reading about complex topics.

Lucikly for me, I was teaching in the semester after James with another colleague, Huw Davies. I set up a Miro Board with content including a blog post, a relevant article and some prompts for students to write about their own experiences of wicked problems. This worked well as a starter exercise the second time we ran the course as the students were more clued in that participation was a strong expectation. The first time round, participation was more patchy. I think this was partly because some students didn’t realise they should participate and some students also told me they felt shy to contribute publicly on controversial topics this early in the course. So in future I’ll need to take more time to reassure students and establish ground rules for safe online spaces.

Where the use of Miro really took off on this course though was the group projects. In these projects we had students working on an educational response to a wicked problem in groups that were multicultural, interdisciplinary and included online as well as in person students. I’d imagined that we’d have to get the in person students to hold up poster paper to the camera for online students or something like that but the students were way ahead of me! As they were now familiar with Miro the students quickly started new Boards on which the developed beautifully rich, varied and complex representations of their wicked problems and proposed educational responses. I think this worked in this context partly because the students had plenty of time to learn to use Miro, partly because the students really cared about the wicked problems, partly because there was plenty of diversity in the student groups, and partly because it was part of an assessment.

Do comment on what digital tools work in your teaching and why 🙂

Photo by Google DeepMind on Unsplash