I spend a great deal of time facilitating courses helping teachers learn how to integrate ICT into their everyday practice. Although I have facilitated such courses in blended format with a great deal of face to face input, most of the time now I find myself facilitating 100% online. There are worries of course about what happens when a course participant meets technical problems but most of these can be solved quite quickly with relevant screenshots and a careful description of what has been done up to that point. The printscreen button on the keyboard is invaluable in producing ‘photos’ of error messages or whatever else may be giving a problem when using a specific tool and I make increasing use of screencasting tools such as Screenr which help me to demonstrate how to do something on the screen quite easily.
Of course this requires a little learner training as well in the use of the PrintScreen button for example. But it is as much a question of attitude as it is a matter of technical skill. I don’t consider it a success if I discover that a learner has been spending hours over some trivial technical task. As a facilitator I would advise my learners to
- recognise when it’s time to get help
- explore the FAQ/help pages of the tool they are trying to use
- search the Internet for help (YouTube is especially helpful in this respect)
- ask for help in the course technical forum
- respond to their course colleagues’ questions in the technical forum
- ask the facilitator to help
As the facilitator, if I can’t answer a question from my own knowledge, then what I do is nothing more than to go through the procedure described above. It’s just that instead of course colleagues I have facilitator colleagues whose brains I can pick.
For teachers learning to integrate ICT this procedure will be much more helpful to them once the course has ended rather than using the facilitator as first resort. In fact I would suggest that this approach is useful in almost any situation when you come across a problem. People are more likely to help you if they can see that you have made some efforts to help yourself first. And to finish on a personal note, people often praise my patience, but I do rapidly lose it when I feel that I am being used as Google stand-in. I must say that this happens most often with people sitting on the other side of the desk from me rather than with my online learners. So, what’s the URL for Screenr? Let me Google that for you!