Students enjoy new teaching tool
General

Students enjoy new teaching tool

  • 21 April 2007
  • 1 min read

              Podcasting has taken Anne-Marie Williamson's graduate nursing students to a whole new level. Williamson is an assistant professor of nursing at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Her pilot program is not a year old yet, but students already clamor for portable technology that provides them with video programs, slide presentations and audio.

                Topics are prepared and edited into concise and accurate info-nuggets. After downloading the programs to the video iPods provided, students are able to access the information at the time, in the place, and in the order of their choosing.  The students come prepared to discuss the information in class, rather than spending class time listening to a lecture.

                Future plans include creating podcasts of health assessment techniques so that the multimodal information is always available for reference with just a few clicks of the iPod. Before an examination they would be able to watch a podcast video with audio commentary of a specific technique as a form of review before they actually perform the assessment.

                And, according to Williamson, this is only the beginning. She is currently in a doctoral program in instructional technology at the University of Nebraska. Williamson states, "The only boundary to the use of new technology in education is the limit of our imaginations."

                There are few universities in Texas using podcasting and iPods but that is changing. Williamson will give presentations about her pilot program and what she envisions for the future of podcasting in education at the national meeting of the National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Faculties in April, The Rutgers International Nursing Computer and Technology Conference in June, and the International Nurse Educators Conference in the Rockies, in July.