Aidan McFall

It is important to use technology tools that work for both instructors and students. There is a need for positions that specialize in technical recommendations for education.

Service learning can change the trajectory of lives: both the student's and the recipient. Despite the extra time required to develop service learning projects, it would be great if this type of education could come back to a higher priority.

There are a lot of steps to developing a service learning project. Buy in from administrators, students and community members, issues of liability and insurance, evaluations. 

Knowing what is needed in your community would help to build service learning projects that maximize the impact students receive from these experiences. Helping others is one of the most rewarding of experiences and the data shows that students often change where and what jobs they apply to after such learning experiences.

Service learning is a great way to be a part of the community and learn, in part, through observations in real time of how things work. It is great for students to see professional behavior exhibited by workers.

Students in my field are showing signs of excessive reliance on technical integration without the hands-on scientific skills students of old displayed after obtaining a BS. In other words, half of my students have a pre-existing bachelors but struggle with basic science psychomotor skills. A balance is needed.

It is interesting that being a good instructor may include knowledge of technical supports available to augment learning. There are rules demanding individuated education for all, but not support systems to provide current, cost-effective best technical strategies to supply it. 

I can see that just collecting information on options available to you would be daunting. Especially because sales information and actual use information are often totally different. It is nice to know that there are options for peer-based information exchange on these topics.

Identifying technical areas to invest in and then how to invest seems like an industry unto itself. Sometimes it seems as if all of our technology, and the software patches that support its integrated use, is a source of many limitations and frustrations instead of efficiency.

I am grateful for the copyright information on what constitutes fair use. I will re-access these resources.