How Teachers Grow Their Technical Skills For Online Courses: A Veteran Teacher’s Real Experience
It was 4:15 on a Tuesday last March, and I was shoving graded lab reports into my backpack when I heard Lila, the second-year 4th grade teacher down the hall, sigh so loud it carried through the open staff room door. She was slouched at the table, her laptop open to the district’s new learning management system, half a cold granola bar next to her, and a crumpled sheet of notes from Saturday’s mandatory tech training. “I’ve spent three hours trying to embed a single reading quiz, and it still won’t auto-grade,” she said. “I feel like an idiot. If I can’t figure out this basic stuff for our hybrid online weeks, maybe I shouldn’t be teaching right now.”
I remember saying almost the exact same thing back in 2020, when we first shifted to remote learning. I spent two days trying to upload a 10-minute lecture video, and every time it got halfway through uploading, my internet cut out. I sat on my living room floor and cried into a half-eaten bag of Goldfish crackers, convinced I was too old, too slow, too bad at tech to keep teaching.
I pulled a chair next to Lila, and asked her one question: What do you actually need to get done this week? She’d spent the whole weekend trying to master every feature the training had mentioned: discussion boards, parent portals, small group breakout rooms, all of it. But when she stopped to think, she only actually needed one thing: a place to post the weekly homework list so parents would stop emailing her 15 times a day asking for assignments.
We spent 12 minutes on that. We clicked through the obvious buttons, found the pages widget, dragged it to the homepage, typed up the list, and hit publish. That was it. She didn’t leave that afternoon a tech expert. She left with one working thing she needed that week, and that was enough.
This is the thing no one tells you about growing as an educator when it comes to building and running online courses. All the professional development blurbs talk about getting certified in 10 different tools, mastering technical skills from A to Z, but almost none of the real growth I’ve seen (and experienced) happens that way. The 4-hour Saturday trainings where we rush through 15 different features? I leave those with a handout I throw away the next week, and I can’t remember a single thing I learned. The big paid online courses for educators that promise to make you a tech pro? I’ve never used more than one trick from any of them.
Real growth happens in small, just-in-time bits, from the people around you, not from formal training. After my 2020 breakdown, the first thing that fixed my video upload problem was the 16-year-old kid who mows my lawn. I mentioned I was stuck while he was waiting for me to pay him for trimming my hedges, he pulled out his phone, showed me how to compress the file for free in 90 seconds, and that was that. A month later, my 8th grade student Javi, who spent all his free time making TikTok edits, showed me how to trim out my long pauses right in the browser instead of exporting a whole new file, cutting my prep time by hours a week. Last year, a parent of a hard of hearing student offered to do a 20-minute after school zoom for any teacher who wanted to learn how to add auto closed captions to lecture videos. I went, I learned that one trick, I’ve used it every week since.
What I tell new teachers like Lila now, and what I wish more parents understood too, is that you don’t need to master all the technical stuff at once. If you’re a teacher building an online course, start with the one thing you need this week, not the 10 things you might need next semester. If you get stuck, ask the person right in front of you before you book a meeting with the overloaded district tech coach: ask your students, ask the teacher down the hall who already uses the tool you’re trying to figure out, ask if any parent volunteers have the skills to walk you through it for 15 minutes. It’s okay to tell your students and parents “I’m still learning this, let me know if this link doesn’t work for you.” I’ve been doing this for 18 years, and I still have broken links in my 2021 online units that I haven’t gotten around to fixing. No one has complained yet.
For parents, this looks different, but it’s simple too. If you have basic tech skills, don’t assume your child’s teacher already knows everything. A lot of us learned to teach before online courses were standard, and we don’t have 10 extra hours a week to learn new tools. When PTA asks for volunteers, offering to help a teacher embed videos or fix a broken course page is just as helpful as bringing cookies for back to school night.
Last week, I ran into Lila in the grocery store parking lot. She had her toddler strapped into the car seat, and a stack of picture books on the passenger seat. She told me she just did her first full set of auto-graded reading quizzes last week, only three grades got messed up, and she fixed those in 10 minutes after school. The best trick she’d picked up lately? Her 10-year-old daughter showed her how to record short audio feedback for student papers instead of typing it all out, cutting her grading time by two hours a night.
I told her I just learned a new trick two weeks ago: a 7th grader showed me how to make interactive checklists for students to track their own progress in online units, something I’ve been trying to figure out for a year. We laughed about how most of our best technical skills come from people half our age, and she said she’s started setting aside 20 minutes every Sunday to learn just one new small thing, that’s it. Some Sundays she doesn’t feel like it, so she skips it, and that’s okay.
I do the same thing. I’m still not a technical expert, I still get stuck every few weeks when the district updates their platform again. But that’s the thing about growing as an educator: it doesn’t happen in a formal course, it happens one small problem, one 15-minute help session, one working new feature at a time. It’s messy, it’s slow, and it’s almost never the way the professional development brochures say it will be. And that works just fine for me.
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