Today we did our first MS walk in several years. It was awesome to catch up with people we haven’t seen in years! The kids also had a lot of fun running around PNC Arena parking lots. Tonight, I watched the Open Ed 2021 session “Using Open Pedagogy to Promote Pre-service Teachers’ Identity Development during the Pandemic” by Pengtong Qu, Chaoran Wang, and Meina Zhu. Qu is from Indiana University, Wang is from Colby College, and Zhu is from Wayne State University. They worked together to address challenges in teacher education during the pandemic. Preservice teachers were unable to interact in person with students and teachers and were also often unable to visit schools and connect with peers. Qu and colleagues thought about using OER in teacher education. They mentioned that this could help encourage future teachers to use OER later. In these two projects, eight preservice teachers were observed and data was collected in the spring of 2021. Their first open pedagogy project was the creation of YouTube videos about phonemic awareness and phonics activities in literacy courses. Preservice teachers would post their ideas on YouTube and learn from each other. The preservice teachers edited their videos and added music. In the second OER project, the same group of students worked together to review and remix their blogs to create a chapter. Hmmm. I wonder if this approach could be used for bioinformatics. They even had a book designing book to create an open book with a CC license. They drew on various resources to create this resource. With this assignment, pre-service teachers were able to work with each other and establish their professional presence. Qu mentioned some challenges with the timeline for the assignment and revisions. A second challenge was combining groups of videos. Qu thinks being more specific about the assignment and product expectations. I thought the idea of summarizing blogs and having a “technology group” develop the durable intellectual asset or OER was fantastic. I think we can learn from this approach and adapt it to several BIT courses without textbooks.
