One Step at a Time

I came across an amazing website this week called Teacher Training Videos. It provide step by step guides for using Blogs, Backchannel tools, Twitter, Jing, Itunes, Vocaroo, Mailvu and more.

There’s another site I found last month that provides how-to videos as well. It’s called Learn it in 5. It has a library of how-to videos, produced by technology teachers, for the purpose of helping teachers and students navigate through these tools. The step-by-step how-to videos demonstrate how to use Web 2.0 applications like blogs, social networks, podcasts, interactive videos, wikis, slidesharing and much more. Both of these sites give laggards like myself the training and motivation we need to learn Web 2.0 tools.

I recently met with a professor at The University of Akron who said that she needs someone to walk her through different technologies and then provide her with a guide so that she can follow the steps when no one is there to show her. Sites like this are perfect for people like that…people like us.

I’ve been very frustrated in my new classroom though because there’s simply no real innovative way to use a blackboard or an overhead projector. I so desperately want to be trying these new tools in my classroom. My students are bored out of their minds with bookwork and worksheets. I hate teaching like that.

With no opportunity to practice using these tools, it makes it very difficult and unmotivating to learn them. I can watch these how-to videos til I’m blue in the face, but I’ll never truly learn them if I have no platform for using them.