Technology Innovations for Behavioral Education

Dr. Mary Gregerson is the President of a consulting firm, Health, Environment, and Performance Psychology in Leavenworth, KS. She began teaching as an undergraduate and was awarded a Danforth Fellowship for graduate studies based upon her teaching credentials. Her educational publications started with Graduate and Postgraduate Medical Education with the Synchronous Systems Model, based upon a conceptual model that integrates the physical environment like technology into the biopsychosocial model for health, disease, and wellness. In addition to other articles on A role for clinical psychology in health care and policy concerning the physical environment and Shift happens: Embracing technology anchors psychology in electronic streams of revenue, she has edited special editions of The Amplifier, newsletter for the APA Div 46 Media Psychology on Research/Education in Media Psychology, Creativity Media Psychology, New Technologies Media Psychology, Education in Media Psychology. Over 30 years as an educator, Dr. Gregerson has taught undergraduates, graduates, medical students, colleagues, and non-traditional students, with an emphasis on multi-cultural concerns, optimizing teaching effectiveness, and using creative experiential techniques. Springer Science + Media has just published her first book The Cinematic Mirror for Psychology and Life Coaching.

• Foreword.- Introduction.- Virtual Classrooms and Practice Communities Promote Culturally Responsive Health Care.- Behavioral Creative Techniques to Teach Graduate and Medical Students.- Telemental Health Competencies: Training Examples from a Youth Depression Telemedicine Clinic.- Teaching Students to be Competent Opinion Leaders via LEAD.- Internet Research Strategies for Finding High-quality Content.- Ethics and Legality of Psycho-education and Psycho-services Online.

From the reviews: "If you train behavior change scientists or clinical practitioners this book has ideas you can use. Educational technology can be especially valuable for teaching in the complex intersection of psychology and health and this slim volume offers many heuristic examples. Several chapters impressed me. Miguel Sabido's method which "applies behavioral change theory through creative mass media outlets" and results in "entertainment with proven social benefit" (p. 7). Literally hundreds of television programs around the world have benefitted millions with better health. Gregerson's lists (pp. 10-13) of books on the issues and uses of cinema in medical humanities, self and graduate education, and especially psychology is an invaluable. Wallin offers many hints to make our internet searching more productive. By including the terms and formats she offers the searcher becomes the finder: time saving, homing in, and best, finding the highest quality resources. The ways to evaluate the quality of a website (do not use is visual appeal) are especially valuable in our state of information overload. She also explains how to use specialized tools to organize what we find. Two fine chapters address first, telemedicine competencies helpfully separating technology competencies from clinical competencies and from outreach competencies, and then conceptualizing the educators' roles in maximizing patient's self care, incorporating best practices, and then evaluating the outcomes. The volume is capped with a chapter on ethical issues in media psychology with a dozen short examples of the kinds of errors and omissions we might make in dealing with the media. All in all, a fine set of chapters introducing important topics and offering valuable resources." (Ed Zuckerman, Ph.D., June 2011) "Gregerson ... provides seven articles, a foreword, and a preface that cover examples of the role of technology in education, health, and mental health. ... presents many visual examples from websites of how consumers should evaluate the quality of mental health and psychology sites. ... explains how to use Google and other search engines, how to filter by domain, and how to use sidebars, 'wedgewords,' 'feeds,' and Google Scholar. ... is invaluable for undergraduate professors to inform students ... on research uses of the Internet." (Dolores McCarthy, PsycCRITIQUES, Vol. 56 (43), October, 2011)