A Healthcare Education Blog
Medical Assistant Director and Instructor, Nicole Carter, is always looking for new ways to engage her students. One of the founders of the non-profit training institution, Latin American Youth Center Career Academy (LAYCCA) in Washington DC, Nicole says her work is hard but fun and the wins make it all worthwhile. But before you can have wins with students, you have to have engagement.
Continue reading “How to engage medical assisting students with skills simulations”
By Cherry Vanderbeke
Have you noticed there’s a lot of jargon related to learning models that use education technology? Hybrid learning, flipped classroom, blended learning, multi-modal learning, personalized learning, computer-based learning… and more.
– By Angelique Praat –
We wouldn’t be overstating the case to say that Shelly Zimbelman was initially skeptical about teaching the clinical skills of her profession using computer-based simulations. Her first reaction was unequivocal: “There is no way you can simulate an ultrasound scan of a patient by using just a computer and a mouse!”
Continue reading “Learning sonography through e-simulation: A non-believer turned believer”
I’ve never spoken to an educator who doesn’t want the best possible learning experience for their students. That ambition to deliver a comprehensive, engaging and enjoyable educational experience is certainly shared by the instructors at the Kettering College Sonography program.
Continue reading “Enriching sonography students’ learning and confidence with e-simulations.”
By Angelique Praat
Working as an ultrasound technologist in a small radiology department brings challenges and opportunities. Cristina Adriano works for a Medical Group/Imaging Center in San Bernardino County, California. In her job, she isn’t surrounded by other ultrasound professionals every day. So she makes her own opportunities to stay on top of the field.
Continue reading “From the frontline: how SIMTICS helps ultrasound professionals stay on top”
Professor John Windsor is co-founder of SIMTICS, an interactive learning company that provides web based simulations for allied health and medical procedures, which is now called SimTutor. John holds a personal Chair in Surgery at the University of Auckland and is a Consultant Surgeon at Auckland City Hospital. ILH asked him about simulation-based cognitive learning and what inspired him to dream of the SIMTICS product.
As an experienced dental assistant and educator, Cassie Belfancha is always on the look-out for ways to enhance the learning experiences of students and trainees. That’s why she jumped at the opportunity to work with the SimTutor team when they began developing new SIMTICS simulations for dental assisting skills.
SIMTICS is a web-based multi-media platform that was already being used in sonography, radiography, medical assisting, and medical programs around the USA and in other countries including Australia, The Philippines, and India. Each module covers one skill or procedure and comprises a text explanation of the procedure, a video of an expert undertaking the procedure, a 3D anatomy model, and a quiz. But the ground-breaking aspect for the dental assisting field is that students can learn and practice skills interactively with the unique SIMTICS simulations, and test their competence too.
Continue reading “Why web-based simulations should be part of your Dental Assisting curriculum”
When Kaplan University’s Chair of the Medical Assisting Program, Dr Tricia Berry, was first asked to teach medical assisting online in 2006, she thought, that’s crazy!
More than ten years down the track, and now part of Purdue University Global, Trish and her team have proven that their own special form of blended learning produces successful medical assisting professionals. How do they do it? By taking advantage of technological developments that deliver realistic simulations for students to learn their skills and then placing students directly into clinics to practice.
By Angelique Praat
In any teaching environment, students come with a range of talents and challenges, and different learning velocities. Imagine if you could give every student a head start before they reached the classroom. This is the essence of the flipped classroom or blended learning model for healthcare professionals.
Web-based skills learning system, SIMTICS, offers medical and allied health instructors greater scope to prepare their students for the reality of the clinical setting than simply asking them to read their textbooks and watch a video, and hoping they will comply. Through an integrated system of multimodal learning support, students can try procedures via online simulations before they come to class.
Continue reading “Maximizing the teachable moments through flipped classroom and student performance analytics”
What do you do when you live on a remote island in Alaska’s Southeast, but you want to take the next step in your medical assisting career? The skills required for medical assisting are both administrative and clinical. But where do you practice your clinical skills when you don’t have access to a lab every day?