Hello!
My name is Sarah Metherell, I am a 2nd
Year Health and Social Care Student/Digital Skills Mentor.
When I first started as a Digital Skills
Mentor, I was excited to get started and help develop the Learning Landscape
and felt this would be something I would enjoy, especially as I have a skilled
background in ICT. Before we started the job we were given relevant training
and introduced to all the staff we would be working with who were all very welcoming
and supportive.
The role of a digital skills mentor,
involves attending a first year Health and Social Care (Research and
Professional Practice) class every Monday for an hour and observing the way
they learn. The session I attend on the Monday is called a Scale Up session,
which is a new interactive way of learning on a large scale, where students get
to use MacBooks to complete activities (usually in groups) that tutors have set
them. A few examples were, using Google Docs and Diigo to help students become
more organized in the future when finding resources to use in their work.
Another task was to create a power point presentation as a class, where each
table was assigned one task each. Personally, from observing these classes, I
am jealous that we were not taught using the Scale Up method in first year, as
it seems engaging, interactive and fun compared to last year, where we had to
sit there and listen to a power point presentation.
As the year first started off, many
students seemed very shaky and unconfident using the MacBooks, but a couple of
weeks later, students had begun to get the hang of using them, and I think the
installation of the mouse’s most definitely helped. The majority of the
students, found the tasks pretty easy to complete, although there were a few
comments here and there that said the tasks can be difficult at times and
sometimes boring. Also, there were some students that suggested they prefer
working in smaller groups, as big groups feel very disorganised and students
feel they can’t get the best possible help they can. However, the general gist
of the class seem to find the tasks easygoing. The other observations I found,
were usually technical difficulties such as adding a picture, or copying and
pasting.
As a digital skills mentor, I was invited
to attend a Learning the Landscape conference, in which those who are involved
in the project gathered to discuss what could be done to develop ways of
teaching. I found this very interesting and it really gave me an insight as to
what the project is about.
I have very much enjoyed my first term of
being a digital skills mentor and have found observing very fascinating and I
look forward to the second term.
It's great to hear that you observed the sessions as being fun, and view SCALE-UP as a positive way of learning. There are also some good observations about the students' digital skills, which we can explore for the next phase of the project.
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