Day 5 Starting to plant the seeds of Integrating IT into the Class

This is my first day back to University after 2 weeks of semester break. This morning our Clinical Debriefing group discussed Abortion laws in different States including effects of Alcohol, Smoking and Folate deficiency affecting fetal development. One of the students reflected on his GP Clinical Placement on how to assess Capacity i.e. assessing capability of a person with either mental or intellectual disability to make decisions on their health issues. We went through the mental state examination, the mini-mental state examination including the GP mini-cog assesment tool. This student brought his Portfolio in for marking...it weighed almost 10 kg! Yes, no kidding, there was so much work that he had included in the term that it would be impossible for him to add more documents into his fat portfolio and there is another Semester to go! He asked me if he was going to use the same portfolio to put all his Yr2-4 work in and I was stunned. I actually did not know the answer to this question, however, I posed the question to the group to see what they thought of having their portfolio rather in hard copy be saved on the computer and that can be given to me via USB to mark. They were extremely keen on this idea as the thought of lugging their portfolio around for the 4 years did not tickle their fancy . They were keen to save documents and research papers or journals relevant to their learnings and reflections straight into the computer portfolio. I have suggested that they discuss this with the Year Coordinator and put that forward as a suggestion for the Student representative to take it up with the Head of Department. Their suggestion seems utterly sensible, they also suggested that anything they needed to handwrite or draw could be scanned into the file. They pointed out that the 12 areas of competencies that they had to accomplish could be headings of Folders and their reflections for each plus learnings and research or resources they collected could be filed under the respective competency folder headings.
Brilliant!
In my next tutorial, my PBL group started working on our new case scenario, entitled "Blue is for Boys". It is an authentic case study about a young child who presented with peripheral cyanosis (blue fingernails on the extremities) due to a congenital heart problem that had affected the oxygenation of Haemoglobin. They started brainstorming the hypothesis but it occured to me that the discussions could be a lot more effective if they could have used an IT based tool to help them map the issues and to note down the important mechanisms. Time was wasted cleaning the board and the 4 triggers that we covered threw up many issues and learning objectives. One person wrote on the board, whilst another person was scribing so that can be then sent via email to all the group members. Whilst looking at the ICT materials introduced to us in our GCUT ICT course, I discovered this one called " Mindmeister". There is a subscription to this tool for ongoing use, is the University keen to take this up as a teaching tool for PBL? I think it might be a very useful task...check out the video on this link! http://www.mindmeister.com/?first=true