MY DAILY WORK AND ePLATFORMS
I work as a nurse in a Cancer Association. My work consists of support and crisis work with clients, health promotion, rehabilitation guidance, leading peer support groups, training volunteers and coordinating the work they do. I participate in the operation of several professional networks in order to develop the ways we work and to increase co-operation with other operators across organizational boundaries. In association work our budget is always limited and we do much ourselves. For this reason we nurses also do marketing, make educational materials, update the homepage and many tasks more which aren’t in fact directly related to our professional training. Digital tools are used in daily basis. I couldn’t even imagine working without them anymore.
We do marketing a lot in social media via Facebook and Instagram. To create advertising pictures to share in those channels we use the Canva program. It’s free and easy to use to create really nice looking images with text. The COVID-19 pandemic made us take new tools into use and we learned how to use Teams. I participate in meetings, organize remote training and sometimes also set up client meetings with it. WhatsApp isn’t secure enough to be used in client work because of the delicacy of the subjects we discuss with them but instead we use it to communicate with our co-workers and volunteers to organize our every day tasks.
To organize co-operation with other operators I use for example Doodle. It’s a program which helps to schedule meetings. You can suggest multiple dates to participators and they can choose the most suitable for them. This is used to set up health promotion classes to schools. I arrange classes with the school nurses and they see via Doodle which schools have already booked a class and on which day they can set up their own day for this event. In health promotion classes we talk mainly about nicotine products and I’ve made a few quizzes about the subject on Kahoot. The kids love a little competition and at the same time they learn new things. I find these kind of teaching tools really motivating my self too!
In addition to these we use Webropol surveys to collect feedback, Nepton to monitor our working hours and of course all the Office-tools are used daily. We still communicate a lot via email and phone. We record every event, customer contact and volunteer coordination work to Järkkäri which is a statistics program built for all the Cancer Associations across the Finland. The amount of digital tools that we use is increasing all the time and there’s a lot to learn all the time. But that’s the way things are today!
MAYBE A FEW MORE?
I went through the list of apps and platforms given by this assignment and I found a few more that I could use in my work. Creating a YouTube and a TikTok channel to our associations marketing purposes have already been discussed at our work. Mural seemed to be quite an interesting new tool to test. It could be used to organize workshops and projects, to plan operations and overall many more tasks done remotely as a team. I think working remotely increases all the time and we need to have a good selection of different tools to do various things effectively. This thought leads to organizing and Todoist. In this time of period when everything needs good planing and scheduling it would be really nice to have a tool that you could use to organize your whole life with! With Todoist that should be possible: you can include working hours, tasks that you have to do, meetings, your kids hobbies, study time etc. to it. You could link your email to it so you wouldn’t have to use multiple apps at the same time if that’s what you prefer. Sounds almost too convenient! And for the last of this, LinkedIn is a platform that I’ve thought of joining for some time now. I think it would help me to stay tuned about new working possibilities, present my own knowledge to employers and keep me better informed about the phenomenons that are happening in my own field of work.
THE PROS AND CONS
In order to get the most of the digital tools there are some things to remember. What I have learned in working life is that only the ones you know how to use are effective. So know your apps and platforms, their qualities and the possibilities they offer. Select only those in use that you really need. Make sure you have enough time to update the platforms in use. People are used to follow the latest news in daily basis. So if your site stays the same for a long time, your audience is likely to disappear. Know your audience. Speak briefly and about the things they are interested in.
I personally enjoy today’s digital possibilities. I like the fact that all information is easily accessible, although one must always remember the amount of misinformation that internet offers on the side. I like how easy it is to communicate with others these days via social media and I’ve noticed that different apps and platforms can increase creativity and multiply one’s skills too. In working life different digital tools make things easier and have diversified the ways of doing work. Also marketing is really cheap in social media and therefore it’s easy for example raise the awareness of the services offered by ones organization. In personal life I mostly use digital possibilities to amuse myself. I really enjoy for example the movie nights at home when we all pick one together from Netflix and just spend time together as a family. But it’s not only for fun. Without today’s remote tools I wouldn’t be doing this assignment either: the opportunities to educate and develop yourself have become more easier by the digitalization.
The things I consider negative about social media are connected to misinformation, scamming others and risks of spending too much time online. All the things you read are not true and all the people you meet online are not nice. I’ve been scammed my self by a very nice lady who “sold” me a baby seat to a car. Well, that taught me something. By following netiquette the world of social media could be smarter and safer, but I highly doubt that we are quite far from that yet. I try to keep my children safe by teaching them about the facts of the social media phenomenons and by limiting their screen time as well as my own. It’s really easy for us to dive into the digital world for all times and I think this causes a lot of both physical and psychological problems. In order to avoid those we should all remember that there is still the real world out there!
SELF EVALUATION
I enjoyed this assignment because it really made me realize how digitized our lives are at the moment. It made me look at my own work organization from a different point of view: I’ve thought earlier that we are somehow “behind others” but this assignment pointed the fact that we have considered wisely the channels and tools of social media we use and that we have learned a lot in the past three years about the field. Now I have more information about the tools we could test and maybe take into use at our work.
It was really nice also to read other students thought about the subject. Regardless of the field it seems that digitalization has taken over everywhere and people are learning to use it all the time more effectively. It was nice to notice that we have a lot in common but also their texts gave me some new ideas too.