How Do Educators Grow Through Technical Online Courses? A Classroom Teacher’s Experience
It was 8:17pm last January, my 7-year-old was asleep down the hall, and I was staring at my laptop at the kitchen table, granola crumbs stuck to the trackpad, ready to throw my mouse across the room. I was three modules into a district-offered online technical course on interactive assessment tools for 1:1 classrooms, and I’d just messed up embedding a fraction activity for the third time. The error message just said “invalid LTI link” and gave no other clues. I typed out a text to Mia, the high school biology teacher down the street who’d signed up for the same course: I’m quitting. This is a waste of time. I’m just going back to worksheets.
She texted back 2 minutes later: a blurry meme of a cat hiding under a blanket that says “when the tech PD says it’s easy” then: 7am at Main Street Coffee tomorrow. Bring your laptop. I got stuck here last week too.
Main Street Coffee smells like burnt espresso and cinnamon rolls every morning, and the back booth by the window has a wobbly leg that we always prop a napkin under. When I sat down, Mia already had her laptop open, and a 30-second screen recording pulled up from the course’s discussion board. A tech coach from a district 45 minutes away had posted it three days earlier, after someone else asked about the same error. She’d just recorded her screen clicking the “share via district portal” button instead of copying the raw embed code, and that was it. That was the fix. I’d spent 45 minutes the night before reading generic help articles that didn’t apply to our district’s specific set up, and a 30-second video from another person in the course solved it.
Before that, I’d always written off online technical PD as just check-the-box busy work. I’d sat through enough pre-recorded lectures where someone talked at me for an hour about tools I’d never use, then made me take a 10-question quiz to get my credit, and never touched the tool again. But this time was different, not because the course content was so amazing, but because we turned it into something we could use.
Last month, a parent asked me at a fall festival, “Why do you spend all your evenings taking these courses anyway? You’ve been teaching 4th grade for 12 years, don’t you know it all by now?” It’s a fair question. From the outside it looks like extra work for no reason. But what a lot of people don’t see is that our classrooms look nothing like they did 10 years ago. Every kid has a tablet now, we have kids reading at five different levels in one reading group, and we’re required to provide accommodations for kids with learning differences that I didn’t even get training for when I got my teaching degree. Technical online courses are the only way most of us can fit that learning in around lesson planning, grading, and our own kids’ bedtime routines. You can do them at 8pm after the house is quiet, instead of taking a whole day off from class for in-person PD that you have to drive 45 minutes to get to.
Over the past year, working through three different technical online courses with Mia, I’ve figured out a few things that actually help educators grow from these courses, instead of just getting through them for the credit. The first one is, don’t do it alone. You don’t need a big group, just one other person who teaches in the same district, same context as you. Most districts sign up a handful of teachers for these courses anyway, so just text the one you know, meet for 45 minutes every other week after school. You don’t have to work through every module together, just bring the parts you got stuck on, and share the tricks you figured out. That’s way more useful than any pre-recorded lecture.
The second thing is, you don’t have to do every part of the course. I see a lot of teachers stress out because they want to get everything out of it, so they spend hours on modules that don’t apply to what they’re doing right now. The first course I took had a whole module on building full asynchronous online courses for remote learning, and I teach all in-person. I skipped it. I just did the three modules on embedding interactive activities and making digital assessments accessible, and that’s all I needed. You can always go back later if you need the other stuff, and most courses don’t take your credit away if you skip a module you don’t need.
The third thing is, test one small thing within a week of learning it. Don’t wait until you know everything there is to know about the tool. I tested my first embedded fraction activity with just my 8-person small math group, not the whole class. If it had crashed mid-lesson, we could have just pulled out the paper fraction tiles and kept going, no big deal. As it turned out, one of my students who usually puts his head down during math finished three extra activities that day and asked if he could do one for homework. That small win was enough to make me want to keep going.
Right now, I’m two modules into a new online course on editing short student videos for social studies projects, and I got stuck on bulk closed captioning two weeks ago. Parent-teacher conferences hit, then state testing prep started, and I haven’t opened the course in 14 days. That’s okay. Growth doesn’t happen on a strict schedule, even when it’s a structured online course. I’ll get back to it when I have an hour after the kids go to bed, and Mia will help me figure out the captioning if I get stuck again. It’s not perfect, it’s often slow, and it leaves a lot of half-finished modules in my course dashboard. But it’s useful, it fits into my real life, and it’s making my classroom better for my kids one small fix at a time.
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