Education is an endless learning cycle. Even after graduating and starting a job, building one’s career, education doesn't stop. Further training helps career-conscious people to continually improve their skills and make their work more professional. For elementary and junior high school managers, helping teachers grow professionally is not only to provide students with the best learning outcomes but also to make them more effective and fulfilling in many other aspects of their work.
Online Teacher Training
Educational skills, school guidelines, and curriculum standards are constantly changing. This makes it difficult for teachers to keep up with the trends and best practices in this area. Teacher professional development makes teachers stronger and more relevant by enabling them to create useful and personalized lessons for today's students. Professionalism in teacher training is the most urgent need of the hour. Knowledge and experience alone are not enough to support a teacher's entire career.
Teachers are incredibly busy with lesson plans, conducting classes, planning, and grading assignments, etc., due to which professional development, learning, and reflection sometimes take a backseat. This is not because of lack of motivation in them, it is because finding time for such activities is challenging for them. E-learning or online learning helps teachers save their time in terms of travel, logistics, access to teachers and allows them to focus on their self-development. Virtual classrooms or online teaching/PD supports educators to improve in creativity, learning, community building, self-reflection, etc.
Here are some benefits of online teacher training:
- Connectivity: By using the online or e-learning platform teachers can stay connected with their facilitators and other co-teachers to exchange resources, videos, ideas, methodologies, and pedagogical practices.
- Flexibility: There is a large variety of resources such as videos, texts, presentations, and quizzes. They can use these resources for their teaching-learning process.
- Innovation: There are different technologies that allow teachers to experiment in their teaching and learning process. It also helps teachers in bringing changes in their teaching-learning process if something does not work.
- Accessibility: Online platforms, tools, and devices are available for the whole day. It helps teachers in creating their teaching material as per their own schedule which can be reviewed several times.
- Learning as passion: Online mediums facilitate teachers in supporting their students' learning. Teachers can get guidance outside of their academic hours as well.
- Efficiency: It helps a teacher in receiving constant feedback from their students or participants about the understanding of content, concepts, and teaching materials. Online platforms also help in providing a wide range of assessment tools according to the need of teaching-learning.
- Time Saving: Time is very precious for everyone. To avoid spending extra time traveling to the centre or organization, educators can spend some quality time learning and understanding new concepts.
- Cost-effective: It helps in reducing the costs when it comes to the classroom, organization, travel expenses, printing costs, etc. Since everything is online, consumption of paper is also reduced.
- Creativity: Regularly it is expected from teachers to become versatile and creative for better student engagement. Using a variety of online platforms and resources provides the opportunity for the creative thinking process to the teachers.
- Lifelong learning: Online platform is one of the mediums through which teachers can increase their knowledge and skills at any age and at any time.
- Community building: Technology helps educators to stay in touch with their colleagues belonging to any part of the world. It also helps them in sharing and upgrading their knowledge, skills, and ideas. This develops inspiration in them.
- Self–reflection: By using modern technology, educators can do recordings of audio and video; prepare educational videos. After preparation, they can see them and edit them as per their requirements and reflections towards any concept or topic. By observing other educators, they become aware of different technological aids, teaching styles, etc., and modify themselves accordingly.
- Feedback: E-Learning allows teachers to receive feedback from their colleagues and their students in a non-threatening manner. This enables teachers to get a perspective on their work and understand the areas of improvement.
Online Teacher Training seeks to provide personal and professional training to a teacher in the most effective way possible, with a user-friendly platform. With a vision to be an indispensable source of information, guidance, and continuing education, striving towards achieving excellence in teaching. This platform helps in self-discovery and self-improvement – after all, the best teachers are those who develop continuously with holistic learning!
Following are a few points which a teacher can expect from online teachers training.
Flexibility and Versatility: Compared to the one-time workshops and face-to-face sessions that are characteristic of most professional development programs, online programs take a very different format with the benefits of convenience, scalability, and adaptability. Different teachers have different needs depending on factors such as the school they teach, the students in their class, their career stages, their experiences, their personal preferences, and learning styles. When properly configured, online programs can be tailored and tuned to meet different needs. For example, modern information technology can store and tag large amounts of data, allowing people to access, share, interact with, and purchase parts to create their own lesson plans and resources. It also helps keep up with new changes in this area. The pandemic has seen a large number of teachers adopting online training to help teachers learn better.
Community of Professionals: Workshops are one of the most social activities. Online teachers Professionals programme especially teacher development programs help teachers in building communities that are often lacking in teachers' daily lives. Teachers can interact online or asynchronously when giving them time to think about ongoing exchanges. Aditya Birla Education Academy’s Facebook Community for teachers can be accessed here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/286789802607370
Online technology can also create communities between teachers and other groups of professionals. Teachers work in a variety of situations, including classrooms, school communities, and training courses. Some workshop participants have also pointed out that online communication can create links between school teachers and managers as well. Such experience builds knowledge and skill of each group and each other's areas of expertise and facilitates the school. Second, online communication allows teachers and managers to connect with educators.
Professional education using online technology can also connect schools across the globe. Schools can explore similarities serving different groups of students and benefit all partners. In addition, expertise can be leveraged regardless of location, allowing teachers with expertise and expertise to act as a resource for teachers elsewhere.
Accountability: Online teacher’s professional development offers more opportunities and scope for participant evaluation and accountability than personal professional development. Facilitators can easily determine that someone is present from the beginning, and they can also determine the quality of learning from the beginning. Similarly, facilitators can invite non-participants to participate in discussions.
Retention: The attrition of teachers in many parts of the country poses significant challenges to both educational stability and the development of quality professional development programs. Although no data has been collected on this subject, some workshop participants have the opportunity for online technology to attract new teachers to their profession and retain existing ones. Online technology isn't just for new teachers. Teachers at all stages of their careers can benefit from the new ideas and connections they enable.
Also read:
How does a teacher training workshop help teachers in supporting students with special educational needs?
10 Reasons Why Online Seminars Offered by ABEA are Beneficial for Teachers
Why is an educators' upskill program important? Find the best online seminar for teachers
