I work in a vocational college, in a coaching team. My title is coordinator-teacher. I work in tuva-education and coaching workshop. My students are young and adults, both Finnish speaking and non-Finnish speaking. My work includes managing the team’s schedules, I make digital teaching material, take care of space and tool reservations and develope tuva-education. I provide guidance to students and follow their progress. I use different digital tools daily, such as Teams (meetings and sharing information), Itslearning as a learning platform, Studenta for managing student data. Our school has digital mentors in every team and I am the other one of my team. Digital mentors guide others with digital tools and are part of developing them. I am actively creating a better atmosphere at work by organising events for teachers.
In Vantaa all the digital tools go through a check up where the services and applications are checked for possible privacy problems. Employees can always suggest new applications and there are two days a year where the group responsible for data protection gathers and does the check ups. I am one of the members of the group.
Social media is our main channel to reach out to students. Social media is used with our students and also marketing to possible students. It is a useful tools with the young but it is important to pay attention to the contents so that the brand doesn’t suffer. At the same time the content must be something that reaches out to the young public. The most active channels are Facebook and Instagram.
I mostly see social media positive but I understand how some feel anxious because of it. Some feel that social media forces the person to be constantly aware of everything that happens around us. Social media has promoted the idea that there has to be something going on all the time and things should progress immediately. Social media entertains us everywhere and for some life without it is boring. Nowadays it is really hard to be without social media, for example waiting for a doctor. It seems like currently it is impossible to just be.
5 TOOLS
I chose Blogger, Doodle, Tiktok, Issuu and Mural because all of them can be used at my work very efficiently. They can be used by both students and teachers, in learning or teaching, and also in ”paper work”. Good application is easy to use, doesn’t require too much personal data and also free version is usable even if it doesn’t have all the features.
- Blogger
Students could write a blog during their own studies and show highlights of their studies. Students could use photos of their work and share their thoughts and feelings of their studies. They could show their personality through the blog and thus show the side of them they usually don’t show to teachers. Blog could aid and support with self-evaluation since self-evaluation is hard for students. Blogs could also enable students to show skills that are hard to show otherwise. Blog could show the timeline of learning well if it was started at the beginning of the studies and updated throughout until the end. - Doodle
Doodle could be useful for planning meetings and events as my work requires a lot of this. My team is rather large so Doodle would make it easier to plan a time that fits everyone’s schedule. - Tiktok
Tiktok is familiar to me through my free time. It could be used as a part of tuva-education. Students could do content under supervision. Tiktok could be used to fix the reputation of tuva-education. It could be used so that no faces of students or teachers are shown. Tiktok is used by many people of different ages so it could be used to reach out to those people who have abandoned Facebook and/or Instagram. - Issuu
Media field is interesting to tuva-students. Issuu could be used to create a magazine meant for tuva-students. Students could learn creative writing, photography and how to plan work and how to use time efficiently. - Mural
Mural could be used for projects and developing. The tool is efficient for team work, especially for smaller group brain-storming. Teachers must develope the processes all the time, so Mural would be good for it. It could also be with students as well, for example planning on Mural what to write and then publishing it through Issuu.
Self evaluation
This was fun assignment. I learned of new applications that I could use at work, and the applications could make my work more interesting. Especially I got excited of Mural. It has been hard to find good applications, and usually I find them by chance. I would like to know how to find good applications easier in the future. Learning about social media wasn’t new for me since I work with the young who already use social media all the time. Even though I am an adult, social media can make insecure as well, so I worry about how it can affect the young and other people who are already insecure. As a whole, the course has had familiar topics but it has taught me to see things from another perspective.