What Are You Showing Us Exactly?

Written by: Danielle Abernethy
Thursday, August 13th, 2009

One of the gems I discovered at the SDE conference was this video from Saturday Night Live showing Fred and his Magic Map. I searched so many different ways, so many different times looking for this video, and finally stumbled across it by accident. It’s a hilarious video showing all the cool things you can do with a map on an interactive white board. But then a question came up, “what are you showing us exactly?”

I fell in love with this video for so many different reasons. Mainly because it emphasizes that we need to be trained on all new programs and equipment, otherwise it’ll be abused and misused. For instance, why is it important to that you can bounce a state or scramble them up? Well for scrambling, can you put the states back in the correct order, and as they entered the Union?

Recently I was conducting a training and a teacher was upset about having to be there all day for a six hour training. After all, it’s netTrekker, simple to use and she already knew how to search. I asked her to just give me a little bit of her time and let’s see how she feels after the first thirty minutes. I started the training, talked about the various ways to search with standards and then keyword and the refinement menu. While the teachers took their turn to find resources, I went over to this particular teacher and asked her if she wanted to stay for a bit longer or if she still wanted to leave. She said that the refinement menu was new, so she’d stick around for a bit longer but probably wouldn’t come back after lunch. As the day progressed, this teacher stayed focus and on task. She had ignored the dictionary button, the read aloud key, the various features, and definitely didn’t know all that you could do with the My Portfolio. She ended up being the last person to leave the session, sticking around to pick my brain for other possibilities.

It proved to me that even if you “know” something, sometimes it’s good to have a refresher or an enhancing session on it. After all, how many times do we teach planets or addition or the structure of the US Government in our curriculum from the time the students start school to the time they graduate? There is always something that needs to be refreshed, and knowledge that can be expanded.

Another thing I learned? Make sure that as a trainer I not only show the class the fun stuff, but the relevant stuff and make the connections to their curriculum. Otherwise, all they’ll do is make Michigan bounce, and really, does Michigan need to be bounced? Make sure there is a connection and they know exactly why they are attending (besides “because I said so”).

If you are about to attend a session of professional development, even if it’s a mandated session that you’ve already been to before, I want you to do some investigating. Keep a fresh mind though and see if there’s some nugget of information that you can actually take away and use. If you don’t find something, raise your hand or approach the instructor at the end and ask how this relates to what you do. Maybe, just maybe, they didn’t realize they weren’t making that connection and you can help them improve their training for the next group.

If you are looking for professional development ideas, check with your CRM Rep. We conduct a variety of training, including an integration coures that are customized to your needs. Digital storytelling, Google Earth, Web 2.0 Tools, and more. All integrate netTrekker and all are hands on fun. Then of course we have our basics, train the trainer, webinars, and nT101 courses. You can’t go wrong with a netTrekker Training.

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Tags: SNL, Training