Technology

NCDA Tech-Related Presentations

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Getting excited for NCDA’s conference. There are several tech-related presentations for attendees to check out. Hope to see you there!!!

Distance Career Coaching and Training: The Asian Narrative
The cultural differences among countries from South Asia to East Asia are immense, yet all agree that career planning is vitally important. The pandemic requires that coaching and training be provided remotely and practitioners have been forced to develop new skills for addressing cultural differences. Learn from these practitioners to effectively deliver career services to culturally diverse Asians.
Presenters: Marilyn Maze, Asia Pacific Career Development Association; Hector Lin, Job Kred; Allan Gatenby, ACPi-Aus; Shujiro Mizuno, Japan Industrial Counseling Association

Grow Your Career Development Practice with Instagram
200+ million lnstagrammers visit at least one business profile a day. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a career services center or agency, Instagram is an effective marketing tool for building brand awareness.  Come learn the ins and outs of a business profile and strategies to leverage IG in your business.
Presenters: Mary Edwin, University of Missouri-St Louis

Counselor Educator Influencers: Social Media as a Mentorship Opportunity
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. continue to rise in popularity throughout the world. In this presentation, attendees will discuss various ways counselor educators can use social media to provide mentorship and professional development to counselors of all backgrounds.
Presenters: Autumn Cabell, DePaul University

Engage and Inspire! Tips and Tricks That Take Your Online Classes to the Next Level
Looking for new ways to interact with your students online? Join the Technology Twins for a demonstration of features and strategies you can use during live meetings. Whether you are teaching a class, presenting a webinar, or meeting with students one-on-one, this session will prepare you to connect at a distance.
Presenters: Melissa Venable, BestColleges.com; Debra Osborn, Florida State University

Delivering Distance Career Services
In the wake of COVID-19, delivering career services via technology is a rapidly growing practice. Practitioners may lack distance services knowledge, training, and confidence. Attendees will learn key elements from distance literature and ethical codes, and engage in a reflective exercise on their personal readiness to provide distance services.
Presenters: Heather Robertson, St. John’s University

Technology and Career Development: Integrating the Past, the Present Pandemic, and Future Possibilities
The pandemic provides career practitioners opportunities to review our use of technology. This session provides a historical review of technology in career development, positions the pandemic as a challenge to re-examine this relationship, and identifies key opportunities for practitioners and the NCDA to adapt and expand to serve our constituents.
Presenters: Dirk Matthews, Columbia College Chicago; Kathyy Batee-Freeman, University of Illinois Springfield; Richard Pyle; Janet Wall, Career Planning Academy; Marilyn Maze, Asia Pacific Career Development Association 

Achieve Career Readiness Programming for Students in the Era of 100% Virtual Services
Come learn how we turned traditionally face-to-face career readiness programs into virtual ones. Through this effort, we still maximized student engagement and access to meet the needs of our campus and virtual learning populations.
Presenters: Keyara Stevenson, North Carolina A&T State University

Innovative Tools and Techniques for Facilitating Virtual Career Workshops with Students
Remote service delivery isn’t going anywhere. In this interactive session, we will use a trauma-informed lens to examine benefits and challenges of engaging groups virtually and then share a variety of tips, tools, and techniques to facilitate engaging and impactful groups in a virtual space.
Presenters: Sarah Zakerski, Realizing Aptitudes; Ashley Flynn, Realizing Aptitudes

Targeting Tall Tales vs. Tangible Tools: Online Career Branding for Both our Clients and for Ourselves
We say: “Target your resume every time” and “Networking is key”.. Clients hear “Waste of time” and “Talk to strangers”. Avoid getting lost in translation with tangible resume and online branding strategies that work in reality, for our busy, complex lives.
Presenters: Ali Breen, Ali Breen Career Coaching and Digital Consulting; Lena Stewart, Modern Resume

Practical Career Development Resources: A Colorful Tour of the NEW NCDA Website
How easy is it to integrate practical resources into daily work? NCDA offers practical resources that can assist you in inspiring and empowering your clients/students. The only problem might be identifying these resources when you need them. Here is your expert guide to NCDA resources, specially the newly updated NCDA website.
Presenter: Melanie Reinersman, NCDA Website & Web Magazine Editor

Navigating Resource Creation and Digitization in the Time of Virtual Learning for International Students and Practitioners
The International Student Services Committee (ISSC) has fostered learning and growth for the international community and practitioners by adapting to the times of uncertainty and creating virtual spaces where learning can continue in non-traditional ways. Come learn innovative learning opportunities that ISCC has created through social media engagement, career resource digitization, and research dissemination.
Presenters: Ivette Mekdessi, Rice University: Center for Career Development; Arame Mbodj, Stanford University; Gaeun Seo, Princeton University, Center for Career Development

Undercover Bosses: A Competency-Based Recruitment Program and its Virtual Transformation
Have you imagined competency-driven recruitment programs where student-employer engagements are made based on skills employers value instead of companies’ names? Our “Undercover Bosses”event has brought diverse students and employers together based on skill matches instead of students’ educational credentials, and we transformed it successfully into an interactive virtual affair.
Presenters: Gaeun Seo, Princeton University; Xiaotang Huang, Princeton University

Embracing Sustainable Innovation from Within: Creating Virtual Practices with Multiple Benefits
We share how our student staff initiated the development of a homegrown online document review process and how it inadvertently allowed us to seamlessly transition our services to a virtual setting. We also examine how this experience provided student staff opportunities to build essential career development competencies.
Presenters: Emma Andruczyk, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Michael Valadez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Using an Online Career Development Course to Prepare Life Science Students
This presentation will share results from a research study involving an online career course designed specifically for life science students.  The course was based on the cognitive information processing (CIP) theory. This presentation will show the effectiveness of a discipline-specific career development course, especially for schools.
Presenters: Serena Christianson, Arizona State University; Robert Reardon, Florida State University

Summer Career Academy: A Programmatic Approach to Career Development During a Global Pandemic
An extension of the article, “Summer Career Academy: A Programmatic Approach to Career Development During a Global Pandemic,”published in NCDA’s Career Developments Magazine, this presentation will investigate the development and implementation of the University of New Hampshire’s Summer Career Academy – a virtual, cost-free career intervention aimed at helping participants cultivate in-demand skills and prepare for the application process.
Presenters: Jonathan Constable, University of New Hampshire; Cayce Jones, University of New Hampshire; Lauren Rhodes, University of New Hampshire

A Plan of Action! Current Crisis-Driven Strategies to Effectively Transition Interactive Career Courses Online
This presentation will explore the challenges faced when transitioning a comprehensive, variable credit, college-level career development course to a virtual format in addition to resources, programs, and strategies for navigating those challenges. Specifically, this presentation will draw upon experiences from an empirically supported career course at Florida State University.
Presenters: Ivey Burbrink, Florida State University; Carley Peace, Florida State University

Can You Hear Me Now? The Practical and Persistent Influence of Technology in K-12 Career Interventions
In many ways, COVID-19 has upended the conventional mechanisms and tools on which career and workforce development practitioners rely. This presentation will explore the possibilities of using technology to create robust delivery systems of career interventions with a specific focus on the development of authentic work-based learning experiences for youth.
Presenters: Steven Myers, Fairfax County Public Schools; Andrew Knoblich, City of Charlotte, NC

Tech Twins Talk Tech With Peak Careers

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The Tech Twins were honored to have a discussion with Jim Peacock of Peak Careers. We talked about “Must Have Technology tools,” as well as go-to resources we use, and even highlight some tips for preventing, minimizing, and combatting tech stress. Watch the Video:

For more info on the tools we mention, links are here. Loved talking with each other and with Jim, and it gives a sneak preview of some of what we’ll be sharing at NCDA.

Tech Twins at NCDA 2021!

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The Tech Twins are very excited to share that we will be presenting live at the 2021 NCDA conference! What would have been a pre-recorded demo of different tools and techniques will now be an experiential time together! We’ll present of what we’ve discovered this past year that has worked well in our classes, and have a time for participants to try out these tools while also sharing what’s worked for them. A mutual learning experience! Hope you’re able to join us. Click here to register!

Orienting Your Audience to Zoom Features

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So many of us have been teaching via Zoom for so long that we may assume that everyone is familiar with Zoom and all of its features. Whether providing a workshop or teaching a class, it’s definitely a good idea to have familiarize participants with the tools that will be needed prior to launching into the presentation.

Here’s an example of a slide after my title and agenda slides:

So worth it to have everyone feel competent (and hopefully excited going into the presentation). I may not use all of these in a workshop, so would edit the slide as need be. Part of my rationale for using these different tools is definitely audience engagement, but I also want participants to leave their time with me having an extra bonus they didn’t realize they were getting, i.e., some cool new tech tools that they can use to improve their own presentations! Plus, if you have them in breakout rooms for even a couple of minutes, they’ll leave the presentation with an increased network.

If you think of it as a warmup activity, you’ll start your presentation with an engaged audience. So you could have a practice slide that has the agenda on it and ask them to mark on the agenda which of the items they are most excited about. They can use the stamp button or a text or make their mark. On that same slide, you might have a poll pre-prepared with the agenda items on them so they can practice voting. You could then have them move to breakout rooms for a 2 minute meet&greet and to come up with one more item they are interested in talking about, and when they come back, have them write their ideas in the chat.

If you want to entertain questions throughout the presentation, you’ll want to set up the rules for that, especially with a larger group. If I have a large group, I’ll typically ask someone to monitor the chat for me and let me know if a question comes in that way. I’ll also make sure to make a note in my notes at the end of every couple of slides to pause for and ask for questions.

Teaching about technology isn’t usually the focus of any of my presentations, so I wouldn’t ever do all of the activities on the slide above. However, I deeply desire for my participants to feel like the material I’m sharing is of value to them, and believe that if they can take the content I’m sharing and integrate it with their own experiences, they’ll learn something of value, and when they share that knowledge with the group, in turn, we all will.

What’s up with QR codes?

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What are QR codes? According to that all knowing source, Wikipedia, QR codes are defined as “a type of matrix barcode first designed in 1994 for the automotive industry in Japan. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that contains information about the item to which it is attached.” Usually, it looks like a box (although it could be a different shape) with black/white dots, lines and squares in it.

Aren’t they old school? Just a fad? Several years ago, I (Deb) was teaching a technology and counseling course, and showed my students how to create a QR code as the new, cool thing. I was seeing them around town as a fast way to get to information instead of typing in a long url – but you had to download a QR scanner app to your phone, and there were very few tools out there to create them. And then, they started to disappear.

Enter the pandemic-and the re-emergence. As everything went virtual, I started noticing those funky little QR codes popping up everywhere – advertisements, in church (“scan to find out more”), and eventually, in my students’ class presentations. When they wanted the class to play a game, use a collaborative tool such as slido or drive, or look at an article or website, they included a QR Code. They didn’t even bother with tiny url. Realizing that this was a way they preferred to get their information, at least in presentations, I started incorporating them as well.

How to create and access QR codes. Creating a QR code has become much more simple. There are many different tools available, but I use QR code Generator. You can make anything a QR code, such as text, a website, a picture, a link to a video, music. For this software, you put the website url, or whatever it is you want to create a QR code for into the box on the left, and before you know it, the program will generate a QR code on the right. At that point, I typically screenshot the box/code and then put it into my slide.

Accessing the QR code. Students with a smartphone can use the camera function and hold it up to the QR code, and the url will be suggested for them to click on and follow. Because not everyone has a smartphone, I also always include a tiny url, especially for a long website address. In the case below, I include the QR code, the original website (mostly to show it is a reputable source), and the tiny.url code.

Only time will tell if QR codes are here to stay, or just a passing fad. With creating and accessing them becoming such a hassle-free process, my bet is that they will be here for the long haul. Now, if we could just get some artists involved to make them prettier to look at, that would be awesome!