Reflecting on one's own work is important in every sphere of life. It is also important for educators. Where educators are expected to ply their trades digitally, it becomes important to also reflect on our own digital competence.                   

See what Brookfield says about Cultural Barriers to reflection in general. Also, the Lenses thorough which we look at our own reflections.

Visit this site  to understand the term digital competence in general. Understand that Digital competence in this sense is about the digital competence of people in general. Educators are special and therefore require a special set of Digital Competence - the work we are currently busy with. (Educators are special because they help shape the competence of people in general.)

Also, read this Open Access article on the importance of Digital Competence for educators. Note the transformative values that digital competencies have on the education profession. In the orientation course of this lab, we were introduced to a formal set of digital competencies that have been developed by the EU to help us understand what the competencies are that teachers require.  If you had not done so already, please visit this site and do a self-assessment on your digital competencies as an educator. An account with the EU site is required. Apparently, it is free and open to all. At the time of writing the assessment was applicable to school educators, but the self-reflection exercise was nevertheless valuable to me.
Do the self-assessment described above. In the final experiment at the end of this section, you will be asked to give feedback on your assessment.  In order to properly reflect on the success or otherwise of an educational project, it is important for experimenters to have a Course with enough content that participants in the course can give feedback on. If you are new to Moodle please watch as many videos in the playlist below as is necessary to get you started. (The videos start with the very basics of Moodle and gradually build up to more complicated topics. Bear in mind, we use a different theme to the Boost theme used in the video; so, the "Gear Icon" and "Turn editing on" etc are slightly different.

Visit this site Teach online. Read the article about new paradigms in education that are emerging.

• Note the four drivers of the new pedagogy; 
• the seven elements contributing to new pedagogies and; 
• The three trends that we can expect from these changes.

Later, in today's experiment, you will be asked to share in the forum how you introduced a new approach to an educational project in line with the changes discussed here. This will be a rated forum activity. 

The internet has a wealth of very useful information that educators can use to improve their digital competence. Take a look at this site. The W3 Schools teaches anybody that is interested in coding everything that is useful. (For example, it is not normally possible in Moodle or the theme we are using at the moment to create headings such as the ones I'm using here. The w3 shools site showed me how. To get white text on an orange background I inserted the following code in my text editor after turning on the HTML code editor. it has an icon that looks like this "<>".  Here is the code, if you are interested:

      <div style="color:white;">

      <h1 style="background-color:#FD6C19"><strong><nr-sentence class="nr-s0" id="nr-s0" page="0"> Resources to help with growth</nr-sentence></strong></h1>

      </div>

All three sites below have courses on the digital competencies that educators require. Please visit them all and use their onboard search engines to see what's available.

Futurelearn

Coursera

Edx

I forgot about this site, it also has some digital competencies that educators may find useful.

Moodle.org has some very useful courses. Please take a look at these. Moodle Basics and Moodle teaching Next level. 

One's own educational practice can only be improved with feedback. Usually, it is feedback from the participants in your educational project that will give the most useful feedback. Moodle has implemented a "Feedback" activity for educators to use. Read about it here. Other Moodle activities can also be used to get feedback, e.g. you could put out a message, asking for feedback, but the result may be a bit haphazard. The Survey activity in Moodle may also be useful, but asks a set of standard questions; we'll experiment with it below. The Moodle Feedback activity is highly customizable and will be used frequently in this lab.

Here is a backup of my Feedback for the previous section of the course. See if you can restore it and edit it for your purpose.
In today's experiment, you will be required to introduce a feedback activity in your course, (By now you should really have a practice course and some content in it for participants to give you feedback on.) If you don't have a practice course yet, go to this section of the Orientation course and get one. If you don't have participants in your course, go to the section on Organisational Communication section in this course and see how you can invite others to become participants in your course.

First, try the Survey activity below (it is not part of the completion requirements for this section). Then, answer the eight questions in the quiz below: When you achieve 16 or more out of 25 for the quiz, the Question and Answer forum that guides today's experiment will be revealed.

In this section, we experimented with Reflection as a competence required by digital educators. 

• We explored the barriers to reflection and the lenses through which we reflect on our educational practice.
• The digital competences required in the new world were shared in a general context (non-educational).
• The new emerging pedagogy was discussed. Its drivers and our responses and strategies to it.
• We explored ways how we can develop ourselves as digital educators.
• We implemented the Feedback activity to gain insight in our educational project from a participant's point of view.

There is a badge up for grabs!

To earn the badge, please make sure the following are completed:

• Quiz - Reflective Practice Quiz
• Forum - Reflective Practice Lab Experiment
• Feedback - Reflective Practice Feedback