ISTE 2 Module

Collaboration and Communication

Learning Objectives

Students will:

1. Identify digital tools that can be used to help them interact, collaborate, and publish.
2. Determine which media and/or format options work best to communicate information and ideas effectively to different audiences.

3. Use digital tools to enhance cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures.

4. Utilize digital tools to contribute to small group projects, produce original works and solve problems.

Triggering Event

How can students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology?

Triggering Event Question: How can nursing students use educational technologies to learn about culturally competent care?

In approaching Module 2, I had to foster my creative side in discovering what educational technologies could be used to teach students about culturally competent care.  This was a challenge for me.  I strongly believe that cultural immersion is the most effective way to learn a culture.  Cultural immersion can encourage deep appreciation and capture in depth cultural knowledge.  Delivering culturally competent care, in my opinion, is no different.  As a nurse, you get better and better with practice and increased familiarity.  I knew that this Module and ITSE standard would be difficult for me!

That being said, I thought a great place to start was in the assigned readings.  I enjoyed the literature that advanced internet applications, or Web 2.0 (Facebook, blogs, Youtube, for example) could be used to develop cultural competence (Ertmer et al., 2011).  I immediately hoped that I could find an informative and emotionally moving TED talk that discussed cultural competence.  Much to my surprise, I could not locate a TED talk on this matter.  I settled for a YouTube video that identified cultural competence in nursing (Towson University, 2012).  I thought this could be a great starting point for students to first identify the concept of culturally competent care.  But how would students be able to demonstrate cultural competence?  Could they effectively communicate across diverse cultures and state the importance of cultural difference (Ertmer et al., 2011) after viewing a quick video?

My search continued.  Here’s my Coggle map!

I was intrigued by one of my classmate’s inclusion of Pinterest for students to meet ITSE 2.  I was able to find this on Pinterest, which was really great.  Informative, aesthetically pleasing.  This pin covers basic culturally competent care: 

I thought that this could be used to identify culturally competent care but would not give the opportunity for students to to demonstrate cultural competence.  I continued to search.

I came across the idea of microblogging.  Classrooms have adopted Twitter and use their classroom accounts to interact across cultures to increase their skill in language and explore cultural significance ( Lomicka & Lord, 2012).  I thought that this was brilliant!  I still thought it would not substitute the in person interactions for culturally competent care, but it could be a good starting point for nursing students.

Culturally competent care is so important for nurses.  In fact, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing require that students are able to demonstrate culturally competence (2008).  To deliver quality care, a nurse must be able to understand cultures different from her own.  I am so passionate about this and excited that there are educational technologies to explore cultural competence!  I think these technologies (YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter) are great resources for the student to build her confidence in understanding cultural competence and prepare her to practice cultural competence in her clinical setting and amongst the classroom!

To answer ITSE 2, I think that microblogging would increase engagement with learners of other cultures but I find it most beneficial for the nursing student to learn from the patient population.  We can learn a great deal from our peers and their past experiences but the patient encounters in practicing culturally competent care are interactions that have profound impact.

References:

American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (2008). The Essentials of Baccalaureate Education for Professional Nursing Practice. Retrieved from http://www.aacn.nche.edu/education-resources/BaccEssentials08.pdf

Ertmer, P. A., Newby, T. J., Yu, J. H., Liu, W., Tomory, A., Lee, Y. M., … Sendurur, P. (2011). Internet and Higher Education Facilitating students ’ global perspectives : Collaborating with international partners using Web 2 . 0 technologies. The Internet and Higher Education, 14(4), 251–261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2011.05.005

Lomicka, L., & Lord, G. (2012). A tale of tweets : Analyzing microblogging among language learners. System, 40(1), 48–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2011.11.001

Towson University, 2012. What is culturally competent healthcare? [Video file]. Retrieved July 20, 2017,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4k8YWqkjqo (Links to an external site.)