Renee Davis talks about educational technology in nursing, its benefits, and how it overlaps with other healthcare education designs and platforms.
Renee Davis has been a registered nurse for eighteen years. She became interested in a career in healthcare as a teenager, and initially looked into becoming a physical therapist. When her mother encouraged her to look into nursing, she reluctantly agreed. She knew the difficulties of a nursing career from her sister who was twelve years older and a nurse, and she wasn't sure she was cut out for it. Renee soon found that she liked the nursing course material. After working in various nursing specialties, she developed a passion for education during a stint as a home care nurse which involved patient education. Accepting a gig as a clinical instructor was her first step on the path towards a career in nursing education.
As for one of the most significant experiences of her nursing education career, Renee cites an experience she had in Nursing academia. She recalls the first academic class that she taught, where she was shocked to see that most students used laptops or other devices instead of notebooks. This was when she saw the impact and necessity of integrating ed tech in Nursing Education.
Renee often includes interactive activities such as polls, games, and group presentations into her nursing education learning environment. Simply “spewing” information does not work, according to her. Instead, educators must be brave enough to switch from the traditional passive “lecturing” mindset, towards engaging their students in active learning. Educational technology can be a marvelous tool to aid active learning.
Instead of telling students to shut off their mobile devices during class, Renee uses these mobile devices in her activities. Her classes are often interrupted by polls using the Polls Everywhere software. She sometimes implements a flipped classroom model where students are expected to read up beforehand on a topic, and come to class prepared to present on it, or discuss it. Besides Polls Everywhere, Renee recommends other educational software and apps such as Mentimeter for polling and presentations, and Voice Thread and Flipgrid for real-time video discussions between students and teachers. She also recommends Google products such as Google Slides and Google Docs which allow real-time edits.
Although Renee has extensive experience in Education, rather than a clinical setting, she believes that active learning techniques can be implemented in a clinical education setting as well. She cites pre and post-conference meetings, where instructors might give students assignments as good opportunities to incorporate interactive techniques. However, she acknowledges that when actual clinical activities are occurring, it might not be feasible to focus on active learning, because the focus will be patient care.
Renee knows that the major hurdle in incorporating active learning techniques and education technology in healthcare education, is not that instructors simply refuse to change. Rather, the instructors get overwhelmed by the novelty and difficulty of trying something new. She affirms Chase’s recommendation that instructors learn one educational software at a time, maybe once a week or once a month, so as to not get overwhelmed. More broadly, Renee wants to see more openness towards educational technology. Even as she speaks at national conferences, she often has to use presentation applications such as PowerPoint instead of other web-based presentation products, due to WiFi not being guaranteed-she thinks this is an area that needs to be addressed, especially in 2020.
Check out Renee’s LinkedIn profile, website, Twitter page and Facebook page.
Sign up for a Free Coaching session with Chase DiMarco, sponsored by Prospective Doctor! You can also join the Med Mnemonist Mastermind FB Group today and learn more about study methods, memory techniques, and MORE! Do check out Read This Before Medical School.