Leveraging Technology Effectively: Part 1

The University of Saskatchewan has six undergraduate Student Competencies. This is the first in a series of five articles that will focus specifically on the Leveraging Technology competency, but as you’ll see, the competencies are interconnected. By the end of the series, you should be more confident in supporting your students in leveraging technology within university and beyond.

What’s the Problem?

Often, people will hear about a new technology and think, “What can I do with this?”. As enticing as that may seem in the moment, it’s the wrong approach to using learning technologies. You wouldn’t pick up a saw and say, “What can I cut?”. Rather, you might have some loose screws in your chair and you’ll instead need a screwdriver (not a saw) to fix it.

Before choosing a technology, you need to ask yourself what is the problem that you’re trying to solve, what is activity do you need to do, or what is the learning outcome you’re trying to support learners to meet. From there, you can start considering options from individual tools (e.g., PowerPoint) to full toolboxes (e.g., Microsoft 365 or ALDA - a GenAI platform for instructors to use to assist in the design of their courses).

There are six digital information literacy components, and you may want learners to engage in one or more of them for an assignment, for example. An appropriate tool for one component may not be for another. Below are the six components and some suggested tools. Note that all the tools listed are approved for student use at USask.

1. Search – Library website or a search engine
2. Consume – Canvas or Panopto
3. Curate – ResearchRabbit
4. Collaborate – Microsoft 365, Perusall, or Lucidchart
5. Create – Pressbooks, Panopto, or Copilot
6. Communicate – Zoom or PowerPoint

What Are Your Philosophies and Ethical Principles?

Beyond practical features, another crucial consideration when selecting a tool is its ethical use and how it aligns with your professional philosophy. This involves assessing the responsibilities, potential impacts, and moral implications of integrating a specific technology or methodology into your learning environment. For instance, does your teaching philosophy truly align with allowing learners to use GenAI on a given assignment? How does it align with requiring learners to pay for an access key to a homework system? And what ethical considerations do you have to make before deciding if you'll allow learners to use a collaborative document to take notes in your class?

If your professional philosophy is out of alignment with how you or your learners are using learning technologies, this can cause added stress for everyone. Taking into account the ethical implications of using the tool and how the use of the tool aligns with your teaching philosophy, relates not only to Leveraging Technology but also the Cultivating Well-Being competency.

What’s The Solution?

Once you’ve defined the problem and done a gut-check on the ethical use of the tool and your professional philosophy, think about potential solutions. If the problem is that you need learners in an online class to collaborate on a project, what tools might work? Do you want to suggest a tool and let the learners decide, or are you going to mandate that they use what you choose? The technologies you choose and what you want learners to do with it should be a potential solution to the problem. If the best tool for the job doesn’t pass your gut-check for that purpose, consider giving students a choice as to whether to use it or something else.

Choosing Technologies

To help you find a solution, USask has a Learning Technologies Ecosystem (LTE) Toolkit. Within the Toolkit, you can search for approved technologies either alphabetically or by the task you need it for. There are tips for how to use each technology and about any limitations. It is important that you choose from approved technologies. If the tool you want to use is not on the list, you can submit a request for it to be reviewed.

In the Toolkit, you can also review the USask LTE Principles (what is considered when the university is choosing these tools) and request the approval of a technology currently not included. Approval of technologies includes considerations by trained USask experts necessary to protect student privacy and security.

There will be more information on choosing appropriate technologies to address given problems throughout this series of articles.

This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license.