Smartphone Accommodation Resource Toolbox (SmART)- Invitation to join our SmART team!!
By Iris Epstein RN, PhD
Are you teaching a course where practical knowledge, hands-on skills, and situated learning are central to your course design? Are you interested in exploring affordable, accessible options of smartphone video tools to connect with students in F2F, blended and/or e-learning contexts? Studies demonstrate that when students record themselves performing a skill and receive feedback, there is an increase in students’ feeling of connectedness and engagement in a community of learners (Chang & Park, 2017; DeBourgh & Prion,2017). After extensive research, we found that students and instructors alike were interested, more broadly, in integrating the use of student’s smartphone video production and video-based instructor feedback into practical/professional courses (like nursing) and wanted to learn more about video production techniques and the affordances of interactive feedback tools, as well as “best practices” for ethics, copyright and data security (Chang & Park, 2017; DeBourgh & Prion,2017; Economides,& Nikolaou,2008; Hecimovich et al.2010; Huddy, 2017) .
The Smartphone Accommodation Resource Toolbox (SmART) is an online platform co-designed and developed by students and faculty to support teaching and learning through the use of smartphone video production and interactive video feedback tools. SmART is developed by students, faculty and staff for students, faculty and staff and supported by AIF York University. It was originally created as an accommodation resource for students.
SmART offers resources and models for:
1) Integrating student-video production into courses where practice-based skills are central, or where students are learning communication skills through hands-on tasks.
2) Learning how instructors can use video-feedback tools to provide audio-visual commentary, visual mark-ups, and multimodal feedback on student created videos.
3) Ethics and security "best practices" for video-making and sharing.
4) Video examples and syllabus models for how students/instructor use video-tools in F2F, blended, and fully online learning, and for including diverse students with unique needs.
If you are interested to get Involved By Beta-Testing SmART in January 2020 or learn more about how SmART can enhance your students experiential learning , check this link and join our SmART team today!! http://smart-toolbox.eecs.yorku.ca/welcome/
About the Author
Dr. Iris Epstein is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Health, School of Nursing at York University. Iris' clinical background is in children, youth mental health, and nursing education and skill acquisition. Her area of expertise includes accessible pedagogy; interdisciplinary scholarship, chronic illness and disabilities, contemporary social theory and mixed methods design (still photography and video/motion recording). Her overall program of research explores the relation between health, technology, and place. Dr. Epstein's research focus on health professional students with disabilities; their stories; assisted technology, accommodation and the places where they learn. Dr. Epstein's research is currently supported by SSHRC IDG and the Academic Innovation Fund (AIF) at York University.