How Do Educators Grow Their Technical Skills for Online Courses? A Classroom Teacher’s Experience
The gym smelled like old floor wax and leftover popcorn from the middle school basketball game the night before. It was 6:30 pm on a Tuesday, and I’d just spilled my lukewarm oat milk coffee all over the edge of my lesson plan folder. Twelve parents sat in folding chairs waiting for me to walk them through our new online student portal, the one the district rolled out that semester. I hit the “share” button on the projector, and the screen blinked up a big, gray error: Content Not Found.
My face heated up. I’d spent three hours the night before going through the district’s mandatory 4-module online technical course for this exact portal. I’d answered all the quiz questions at the end, got my 100% and my certificate of completion. But I couldn’t remember a single step to fix whatever I’d broken. Then Mrs. Lopez, whose son is in my 4th grade class, leaned forward. She does graphic design for a local marketing firm, and I’d seen her tweak her website between sessions at parent teacher conferences. “Can I take a quick look?” she asked. “I mess up embed links all the time.” Five minutes later, we were up and running, and I was already counting out a five dollar bill to pay her back for the coffee I owed her.
I’ve been teaching elementary school for 12 years. For the first 10, the only technical skill I needed was how to work the copy machine and reset the classroom projector. When the pandemic hit, we all scrambled to learn overnight, and ever since, every email from the district ends with a reminder that we need to keep growing our technical skills for online learning, usually through another 8-hour generic online course. I used to think that’s how it worked: you sign up, you do the hours, you get the skills. That night in the gym, I realized that system doesn’t work for most of us.
A month later, I asked the school’s tech club coordinator if I could have one of the 5th grade tech helpers stop by my classroom for 10 minutes every Friday after school. Javi, a 10 year old who brings his own keyboard to school to code during free time, volunteered. He doesn’t lecture me, and he doesn’t care that I’ve been teaching longer than he’s been alive. I write down the one or two problems I ran into that week (last month it was “my choice boards take 5 minutes to load” and “how do I stop parents from commenting on every student’s assignment”) and he shows me the trick, right on my own laptop. He even showed me how to turn off all those distracting notification pop-ups that the district forces us to have, something the district’s 2 hour course never mentioned.
I also stopped scrolling through the district’s course list and started searching for what I need, when I need it. When I couldn’t figure out how to set up timed online quizzes for reading comprehension, I didn’t sign up for a 4 week course on educational assessment tech. I searched “how to make a timed quiz in Canvas for elementary” and found a 9 minute video from a 3rd grade teacher in Cleveland. She fumbled through the first two steps same as I would, forgot where the setting was once, and by the end I had my quiz set up. That took 15 minutes total, instead of a full afternoon of generic training.
A lot of parents ask me why there are so many technical glitches in their kid’s online assignments, and I get the frustration. It’s fair to be annoyed when you can’t find the homework link the night before it’s due. What a lot of people don’t see is that the way we’re told to grow our technical skills is broken. Those long, pre-made online technical courses for educators cover every possible use case, from high school AP teachers to district admins, so 70% of the content never applies to a 4th grade teacher who just needs to post homework and host a parent call. By the time you actually need the skill you learned 6 months earlier, you’ve forgotten it anyway.
What actually works, from what I’ve tried, is small, problem-focused growth, not big formal courses. If you’re a teacher reading this, you can try this: pick one small problem you had this week, find a 10 minute answer from someone who does your same job, then ask a student who loves tech to walk you through it once. It takes 15 minutes a week, not a full day of sub coverage to go to a training. If you’re a parent reading this, if you know your way around tech and you notice your kid’s teacher struggling, it’s not rude to offer a quick tip. I’ve been texting Mrs. Lopez quick questions once a month for 8 months now, and she’s never once minded. It helps me, and it helps every kid in the class.
I used to feel embarrassed that I didn’t know all this stuff already. I thought good teachers had all the skills they needed before they stepped in front of a class. Now I just say it out loud when something breaks, in front of the kids and the parents. Last week, we were doing an interactive online activity for our solar system unit, and the whole thing crashed 10 minutes in. I shrugged and told the class “Okay, I broke it. Who wants to help me fix it?” Two kids raised their hands immediately, and they had it back up in 3 minutes. We got through the lesson, and they got to be the experts for a change.
Last night, I tried to embed a new interactive math practice tool into our class page, and I got the same gray error I got that night in the gym. I saved what I had, closed my laptop, and poured a glass of iced tea. I texted Javi to stop by Friday after school, and I wrote “broken embed link” at the top of my weekly note to him. I’m not going to earn a fancy tech certification this year, and I’m still going to break things regularly. But every week, I fix one or two things I couldn’t fix before. That’s growth, right? It’s not neat, and it doesn’t come from a pre-recorded online course. It just comes from asking for help, one problem at a time.
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