Sunday, October 24, 2010

Teaching with Technology

      As an Early Intervention Nurse, I am teaching parents all the time.  The Early Intervention program I work for is located in the "Center for Person's with Disabilities" at Utah State University.  This association with USU requires our program to train students from many areas of the University.  I love the interaction I have with not just nursing students, but psychology, special education, speech pathology and education students.  My interaction with students is usually one-on-one and provides me the chance to mentor as well as teach.  I know that as a Family Nurse Practitioner, I will continue to teach on a regular basis.  I can not think of any nursing/health care provider that is not a teacher.  I can think of some that are not effective teachers, but it is required of them to teach.


Here is a link to the Wiki site Mobile Devices created for N6004
http://editthis.info/nurs_6004_mobile_devices/Main_Page

Monday, October 18, 2010

Information Retrieval

     This assignment brought back terrible memories from my evidence-based practice class.  I think I suffer from PTEBPC (Post traumatic evidence-based practice class).   I am determined to get the needed treatment and therapy to become successful at information retrieval.

     For Module 3, I used PubMed, CINAHL, National Guideline Clearinghouse, Google (Scholar) and Google to search for speech development in infants and preschoolers with otitis media.  
     I am very inefficient and spent many hours not really getting the information I was looking for.  I decided to really stick with PubMed because I have never gotten the hang of it.  I did not like the results I got from PubMed when searching from within Endnote (I did not realize until now that the search function is different).  I got better results when I searched PubMed and then imported the citations into Endnote.  I spent a good amount of time trying to find the MESH terms of my problem.  These terms were very helpful in getting good results when applied as a major topic.  The problem I had was that I could get results of about 6200 and then when I refined my search just a little, I would get only 9 articles.  I am not sure if that is good or bad.  I really liked the information from National Guideline Clearinghouse, it was easy to navigate using categories and I loved being able to compare more than one guideline side by side.  I am very surprised at the good information I obtained from Google Scholar.  Most information was old and often the links to the articles did not work, but surprisingly I found access to 3 of the articles I had found through PubMed.  My Google search was helpful because they had beautiful color photos of eardrums with varied degrees of otitis media compared to normal tympanic membranes.  
     I have learned many new things from this experience and hope to become more comfortable with this technology.  Depending on my needs, I will use all of the above indexes and search engines in the future.