Can you tell it's graduation time? As I peruse though my Facebook wall I see all these sappy posts about graduation. Parents wondering where the time has went, students enjoying every last minute with their friends, siblings wondering what life will be like without their brother or sister in the house this fall. Everything is changing.
The world of education is changing. This years seniors in our district were the first to graduate that were given a MacBook to use throughout the year. The education that happened in our district this year looked different that many of our teachers could have imagined just a few short years ago. Change is here. Change will now be constant. Change is our new way of life.
When I volunteered to take this course just a few short months ago I had no idea how important it was going to end up being. A few weeks after I signed up I was told that I would be facilitating our districts first online professional development course. So the first day of my class about online teaching, was my first day teaching an online class! So the timing wasn't ideal, but that's how those things go. And since then, I have found out that I will have the opportunity to teach an online class next year for seniors, as well as continue my eLearning Coach position with an emphasis on helping out the other teachers that are doing online and blended courses.
So the content in this course has been very valuable to me right where I am today, as well as looking toward the future. While I have taken many online courses over the past 10 years, I hadn't ever really put much thought into how to design a course. So even the most basic information that was given was very enlightening and will help me be a better educator as I enter the next school year.
The other part of this learning process that I loved was the ability to use many of the tools that I tell teachers about all the time, from the student perspective. As the "tech person," I'm constantly finding tools and showing teachers how to set them up and use them. But to actually get to use them myself to create or complete an assignment was a great opportunity.
So now summer is here, and the sappy graduation posts will subside soon enough. However, the teachers know that even summer "vacation" is full of planning for the next year. So here I go! The end of this course is just the beginning of my planning time. And I'm so grateful to have this new knowledge and set of tools to use along the way!
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