How Do Educators Build Technical Skills for Online Courses? A Teacher’s Real Experience
The coffee in my mug had gone lukewarm, my 10-year-old had dripped Elmer’s glue all over the field trip permission slip I needed to turn in the next day, and I was staring at a mandatory 3-hour online course titled “Core Skills for Digital Learning” that my district had emailed me at 4 p.m. on a Friday. I groaned, closed the tab, and went back to gluing the permission slip back together. I’d been teaching 4th grade for 12 years, but when it came to the technical side of running hybrid and occasional online courses, I still felt like a first-year teacher fumbling with a chalkboard that wouldn’t erase.
That same night, my colleague Mia texted me. She’d found a 4-week small online course for local elementary educators, just 20 minutes after school once a week, focused on fixing the actual tech problems we deal with every day. She had an extra spot, and did I want it? I almost said no. I already worked 10-hour days during the week, and any extra “professional development” usually just felt like another box to check. But I’d spent that entire morning troubleshooting why half my class couldn’t access the daily math video I’d posted, so I said yes.
The first session opened with none of the generic corporate introductions I’d come to expect from mandatory training. There were 8 of us, all elementary teachers, and the person leading it was a 3rd grade teacher from the next town over, not an outside tech consultant who’d never stood in front of a room of 25 8-year-olds. First thing she said was, “We’re not covering everything today. We’re solving one problem you have right now, and we’ll all do the steps together. If your screen freezes mid-step, just say so, we’ll wait.”
The first problem we tackled was the one I’d been complaining about for two years: why do almost all your kids get that “request access” pop-up when you link a Google file to your class page? I’d gotten so used to sending an apology email and re-sharing the file every time that I’d just accepted it as part of online teaching. Turns out I was clicking the wrong share button the entire time. I was still defaulting to sharing to only people in my personal Google workspace, instead of switching it to “anyone with link can view.” That one 2-minute fix cut my parent emails about missing assignments by half that month.
I’ve taken a handful of big, fancy technical courses for online teaching over the years, and none of them ever mentioned that tiny, specific quirk. Most of them spend hours walking through 50 different features I’ll never use as an elementary teacher – building full interactive modules, designing year-long online curricula – and by the time they get to the small, annoying problems I deal with every week, my attention is gone, and I’m already sorting through the backpack I left by the door.
What I’ve learned over the past year is that educator growth with technical skills doesn’t happen in those big, one-and-done trainings. It happens in small, targeted chunks, when the skill you’re learning solves a problem you have right now. For teachers who want to get more comfortable with the technical side of online courses, the first step isn’t to sign up for a 10-week certification or clear a whole weekend to study. It’s to write down the one thing that annoys you most that week – messed up links, breakout rooms that take 10 minutes to sort, closed captions that won’t generate – and look for a small group or short session focused just on that. Most local education agencies offer these for free, and many school tech coaches will put together a 20-minute grade-level session if you ask.
For parents reading this, this is why you might notice that your kid’s online lessons are a little clunky at the start of the year, and get smoother as the year goes on. Most of us didn’t learn how to manage the technical side of online courses in college. We’re learning it on the job, around grading, lesson plans, parent meetings, and our own kids’ doctor’s appointments and soccer practices. It’s not that we don’t care about getting it right. It’s that we can only absorb so much new information at once, when we’re already juggling a hundred other things. When we get to learn one small fix at a time, it sticks, and that means fewer broken links and fewer missed assignments for your kid.
Last week, we had a full snow day online, and I had to run all my classes from my dining room. Before I took that small course, I would have spent 45 minutes before school testing links and sorting breakout rooms, and I still would have had a dozen kids stuck with access issues. This time, I did all of it in 10 minutes, everything worked, and we got to start morning meeting right on time.
I still mess up sometimes. Last week I accidentally recorded a read-aloud with my camera covered by a sticky note, so the whole video was just blank yellow. I still leave my mic muted when I’m talking to the whole class half the time. I’m never going to be a tech expert, and I don’t need to be. Growth isn’t about being able to build a full online course from scratch. It’s about picking up one small skill that makes your day easier, and your students’ day smoother, every few weeks. Next month, I’m joining another 2-week session on how to add closed captions to my videos faster. Right now, that takes me 10 minutes per video, and if I can cut that down to 2, that’s 8 extra minutes I can spend grading reading portfolios, or wiping glue off my kitchen table. That’s enough growth for me right now.
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