Teacher Tutorials

After a meeting with my division In-tech's, I shared a few tutorials and came up with some other ideas. Besides that, Jen thought it would be good that we share these with each other. So here is my rant of why tutorials are useful and where we can share.

Why?

I have tried to put on after school sessions on how to use some of these web 2.0 devices. These sessions were not what I would consider successful. In my investigations, I found out a few common reasons why.

1. Teachers are busy and cannot always set their schedule around tech meetings.

2. Teachers feel embarrassed about their possible inabilities on the computer and are afraid

of making mistakes.

3. Teachers like myself do not make great students. We know our learning styles and

usually enjoy a more comfortable and independent learning.

ie. We don't create unit and lesson plans in the staffroom and collaborate with non-

subject like staff on it.

4. Teachers hate waisting their precious time. If the technology fails, they shut down.

After finding this out I decided to try and make things easier. That is when I began creating tutorials. I downloaded a program called Camstudio, a screen capture program, and started with what my staff were having the most problems with. I found that with technology, many people would rather screw up by themselves or one on one with a trustworthy individual. The video tutorials allow teachers to make mistakes, stop, watch the video, try again, make more mistakes, rewind the video and so on.

Now we all know the power of numbers and networks, so I suggest we use them. I have created a wiki, Teacher Tutorials, to store teacher based tutorials. I would like to invite you to view, add, remix, or whatever you like. It is my hope that this wiki is something for professional educators all over the world can use.

Technology can be frustrating so let us share our easy buttons.