This semester as the Technology Coordinator, I've taken on the iceberg-sized challenge of analyzing our current LMS systems. I used surveys, emails, focus groups, class observations and everything short of telepathy to analyze what would be better digital learning platforms for our school.
Currently, we use Seesaw for grades preK - 3, Teams for 4 - 12 and ManageBac for 7 - 12 as well. These systems are also used in addition to our messaging platform, virtual meeting platform, and our online SIS! Overwhelmingly, the most feedback has been that we have far too many programs, and we all just need to simplify things a bit.
After careful consideration, we decided it would be best to keep Seesaw and ManageBac as our student learning platforms, and just disable Teams for students. It seems like such a simple solution, so with the support of the teachers and administration, I've been tasked with leading this initiative!
From my previous work with CTSC, I remember how much time it can take to really get teachers on board with a new program. We are training grade 4 teachers and students in Seesaw, and grade 5 and 6 in ManageBac. Luckily, Seesaw is super intuitive! Unfortunately, ManageBac is not - so I have set out training schedules and started creating tutorials for everyone to follow.
This is the exciting part - I finally have a great chance to use the tutorial builder Iorad! As the edtech coordinator, I am organizing in person trainings for most staff, managing some amazing teacher volunteers to be the in-person facilitators. But our teachers are so busy that I wanted to provide an asynchronous way for them to learn on their own as well.
Iorad basically captures your clicks as you complete a process, then creates an interactive tutorial. You can blur sensitive data and add a computer generated speech-to-text voice (that honestly doesn't sound that bad). Check out this short example I made for how to use the new ManageBac chat function:
There is even a Chrome extension that allows users to see publicly shared tutorials for any website, but it's been glitchy with the Chinese server hosted version of ManageBac. Instead, I've been sharing the tutorials through links on our SIS documents page, which is easily accessible anytime teachers need a quick how-to.
I'm still learning all the features that Iorad has to offer, but so far testing with a few teachers, they loved the interactivity! It's always more rewarding to engage someone with an interactive click-through, rather than asking them to sit through a video (let's be honest, no amount of memes can make PD ed tech videos engaging!). I'll be using this tool pretty heavily, and hope to even introduce it to my students so that they can make their own tutorials next semester too!