Flexible Educational Resources
Due to the nature of our online school, we inherently provide our students with a variety of resources to explore the content. In addition to what is already provided in the content, teachers often create their own resources to supplement the provided curriculum. Our professional development courses are no different!
In our new teacher training courses, we provide embedded videos, text, images, presentations, and interactives for our students (the new-to-us teachers). One thing I've been working on adding to our Teaching Online Practicum (TOP) course is H5P interactives:
This makes the lesson more interactive for the learner, while also including the necessary information.
In our Coaching Partnership course, the course is more individualized for the learner, but there are a few things everyone needs to do as part of the Partnership. So we have some standard content for everyone, but we also have pages that serve as landing pages to get teachers to the resources they need for their particular focus area:
From this page, instructors can choose a specific focus area, which sends them to a page of resources curated specifically for that focus area:
Because this course is new, we are still building this library, but our hope is that each semester, the library for each focus area can grow, becoming a place for our instructors to visit to find many, many resources for their focus area. The particular example above is probably our most robust library because synchronous sessions (what we call live learning sessions) are often a self-identified trouble spot for instructors, but also an area where it is easy (and fun) to customize the experience for students to make it engaging.
Lastly, we cannot assume that our courses are the end-all, be-all for professional development. Just like my courses with student-age students, my courses with adult students need tweaking every semester after "running through" the course, but also after receiving feedback from our students. We use KickUp for organizing our PD into a library of sorts for our teachers. This program tracks their attendance and also creates an attendance certificate and a yearly transcript of their GAVS PD so they can take it to their f2f schools. We used to use a Microsoft form for our feedback forms, but we've since moved to using the feedback form in KickUp because it generates beautiful data for us (yes, data can be beautiful!). The feedback form in KickUp is anonymous, so, hopefully, the attendees/participants give more honest feedback.
Here's an example of the data we are collecting from this form:
This data allows us to view the effectiveness of our sessions and where our teachers feel as though they need additional support. It also shows what types of support they want the most. The form also has a place to leave comments, which can be very enlightening. Here's a snapshot of some of the comments we received on our Lunch and Learn event:
I highlighted in yellow some of the great comments about the Coaching Partnership, because I know several of these artifacts have touched on that course, but I also highlighted in yellow some areas of growth for our team and presenters. Interestingly, the last commenter would have what they are requesting if they joined the Coaching Partnership 😉.
I'm excited to see our data as we move through the year and adjust our courses to better meet our teachers' needs.
References
Bray, B. (2018, May 8). Opportunities for choice: The learning path to advocacy and Innovation. Rethinking Learning. Retrieved February 2, 2022, from https://barbarabray.net/2018/05/08/continuum-of-choice-choosing-the-learning-path-to-find-passion-and-purpose/
Fisher, Douglas B., and Frey Nancy. “The Good, the Bad, and the New Plcs.” Corwin Connect, 1 Mar. 2021, https://corwin-connect.com/2019/05/the-good-the-bad-and-the-new-plcs/.
Holland, B. (2016, March 8). Take note: How to curate learning digitally. Edutopia. Retrieved August 17, 2022, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/take-note-curate-learning-digitally-beth-holland
McConnell, Tom J., et al. “Virtual Professional Learning Communities: Teachers’ Perceptions of Virtual versus Face-to-Face Professional Development.” Journal of Science Education and Technology, vol. 22, no. 3, 2012, pp. 267–277., https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-012-9391-y.