Challenges are Inevitable, Being Defeated is Optional!

So with, the job that I had right before this is and principal's job, I was the online learning specialist. And so I was asked to move our campus out of edge annuity and into canvas. And so we actually have Katie virtual school coordinators here today. They, gave us courses that they had developed. And so then we tweaked those fit our kids because it had to be a little bit different look. There are nine week courses for, for students because they're accelerated.

So they can take a semester's worth of material in nine weeks. Now, will they? We're working on that. So, yes, trying to get them through. But one of the things that we we really started to develop is how are we gonna mass produce? Like she mentioned, how are we gonna get these courses ready for our kids. And so we are fortunate.

We have five Katie. Well, we're Katie virtual school teachers, we are extending the brand, and there's five sitting back here that, are my team, and I cannot do it without them. They are unicorns, so to speak. They're experts in their content area, but also experts in course design. And so one of the things that we were able to do is put them through some training.

So if you're wanting to deploy this, if you are, wanting to start course building in your district, then some of these are the trainings that I think are necessary. Quality matters is really, one of our favorite companies and and, they're gold standard for course design. But obviously, Canvas certified educator is number one. We just haven't had a chance to get all of them through that quite yet. But when you do, you get a really cute little lanyard, you know.

So that's why we're doing it. Anyway, so, quality matters. I think really the most important one to put anyone through is that K-twelve rubric. If you're higher ed sitting in here, they have one for higher ed as well. But that really starts to give you an idea of what course designs looking like, what alignment looks like.

What good courses should, should look like. So that second one then is a peer reviewer course. And then you're looking at it from an even deeper lens, reviewing an entire course from, you know, most of those standards and then you can actually work for quality matters. This is not a commercial for quality matters. But they do, deploy great courses for, teaching those who are gonna be in course design.

So then step one is to gather and train your team. So you can do this in a variety of ways, but I'll have to say when I first was approached by our district to design my first online course it was as simple as an email that went out district wide. And it just said, if you're interested in pioneering online learning and Katie ISD, respond to this email. And I thought, oh, that sounds kinda cool. I wanna be a part of that.

And, I didn't even know I was gonna get paid to do that. I just thought, Hey, that looks good on my resume. Sounds like fun. I wanna do that. So that's what you need to do.

You need to find those people who are passionate about trying new things in the classroom who are your instructional coaches, and, the just the your department chairs and the people who are the content experts that may or may not have some online learning experience. I when they first told me, I was teaching professional communications at the time, my school speech, And they said, do you think you can build this course? And I said, yeah, you so much technology in my class. Yeah. No problem. Take everything I'm doing, and I'll put it in a Canvas shell, and we'll be good to go.

Well, let's just say I taught that course for nine semesters in a row, making new iterations of that course every single time because I learned so much every time I put content in front of the students, like, oh, directions. There's a concept. Let's include those. Wait. You can't just embed a PDF.

Wait, but that's technology, isn't it? No, it's not. There are steps that have to be taken prior to that. And these training opportunities are what provides the knowledge that you need in order to do that. And if you are blessed enough like we were to be able to get a staff through these different levels, then you're gonna have this power team that can not only build the course but they can teach others how to build the course, and then they can come in as the master reviewers once they have those certifications and review those courses to make sure they're using best practice and they're they have those, you know, those high expectations we have for our online learning opportunities. So once you have that team in place, the course building process then, starts with a a course map, and I wanna highlight that link right there.

So, most of the next few slides are really directly from there. And, you gotta have a map before you get started. And so it's not something that's set in stone once you do it, but it's where you align those objectives. And start looking at those manageable units of learning, but it's that backward design that you are looking for. You've got to have alignment in your courses.

And for us, we're K twelve, so we have standards, state standards, Texas, artiques. And so we have to make sure those are covered in our courses. And so the course map is where we start doing that. It's a road map for the course, and then That way we can evaluate that bridge between courses. And if you have curriculum coordinators in your district that are actually dipping in to look, this is a really good place for them to look.

Not all of them are are Canvas experts. And so looking in, just kind of poking in a course, they may not understand kind of where everything is is bound. And so They do understand the content. Yeah. They do.

So this is, not to say a lot about this, you know, your course outcomes are where you start with and those assessments are where you're gonna start building from and that backwards backwards design, making sure you're hitting those learning activities and learning materials that all, align. Give me the clicker. Just kidding. So again, you know, you're identifying those desired results. You're looking at those objectives.

You're working backwards the assessments, planning those learning experiences and the instruction. So we actually have unit plans in our district our curriculum coordinators have developed with teachers in the district as well. And so that's very nice. That's where we start. We pull out those unit plans and we start saying, okay, Do we have we hit all of these peaks? Are they in this course? And if we're starting from scratch, well, it's a little bit easier, then we can start building those out that way.

So in a course map, It's just gonna have some columns with modules. You can either build those out by units. We do it by week. Just makes more sense for us because our our courses are nine weeks long. Obviously the objectives, and then we're gonna tag the assessments, instruction, and activities with those objectives and those teaks.

And so one of ours looks like this. Our algebra one teacher actually built hers out in the week and then by day, and what objective she was going to to cover. And then you see the alignment across. What activities, what learning materials and what assessments they're going to, provide. I wanted to practice what we preach.

I built a professional development course for our staff to go through. So I did the same thing. You see there's not necessarily standards that were, state standards. These are objectives that I wanted to cover in the courses. So I made up my own naming convention, which is not very original, course objectives, c o, and module objectives, one point one.

So but then you can see how those are aligned as well. You can also, create a professional development map for, sorry, course map. That will teach your staff how to build a course map, and then it's just a map exception, if you will, and, leading them through those trainings. That's great. I was gonna drink some water.

So, of course, development tips really quickly. You do not wanna get bogged down in that course map, teachers that we had, building and rebuilding some courses spent so much time. I had to to stop them. Just stop. That's okay.

It's just a sketch. And then we'll we'll move on. And when I built mine, you you change it as you go. But you're just putting those alignments and assess or objectives and assessments in for that alignment is what you need. What is my famous saying? Thank you.

So you'll really, you do just get it on, get it on there, and then we can tweak it and do other things. But review the first module before it gets too far along. When your your course builders are working, they don't know course design maybe as well as you do. And so you've gotta get in there so that you don't see things like print the PowerPoint or, you know, just a stagnant PDF with no instructions. Those kind of things.

You can you can, help them along the way and then not see it all at the end where they are frustrated. They have to change a lot. And then just set deadlines and check-in often. If you've ever built a course, you know how long it takes. And most people don't understand how long that takes, and they think, oh, I've got all this time, or I do this in the classroom.

I'll just, you know, it just it's a long process. And this death lines really are important you guys because, it's real easy to get wrapped up in all the many hats that we wear and push those deadlines back. But if you're not sticking to those deadlines like concrete, then it it's going to just crumble. So the once you've established those, you have to keep them. And now a commercial break about gamification.

I can't do a presentation without talking about gamification. So I've gamified quite a few courses But if you have courses that, don't need a lot of work, but you maybe wanna add something intriguing to them, then you could gamify those. You could add badges, Canvas is, you know, got their own badging system. You could add levels, add leaderboards. Those are simple things to do.

I did put my website here. I'm not soliciting anything on the website. It's just where I put how I build these courses step by step, and I then them gamified my children's lives, by the way. So, when my daughter was applying for college, I created Canvas course, of course. But the three learning dot com is where you could go and read through if you're interested in something like that, but it's a step by step.

One of my favorite courses I just built, in a my second or third job before this one, was a choose your own adventure in Canvas. And so I used mastery paths to their fullest extent, mastery path in a master path in a master several. And so, I talk about that too. I'm not that blog or that website. But if you go to the commons, you can download the shell.

I took all of the math out of it. And I just left the shell that people could pull in and just play with if you wanted to. You could add your own content. So if you search for Kings Road, it will come up. And since she talked about her favorite gamification course, I wanted to also mention my favorite gamification course.

I had a a teacher who came to I know. I had a teacher who came to me when I was a classroom technology designer, and In Texas, we have the star test, and she wanted a star test review course. She wanted to build. So we worked together on this, and we built, like, fifty two thousand badges in there. And there's every level of Jedi you can imagine in our Star Wars, and there were levels of Jedi that we just created, like Jedi master, emperor.

I mean, it was just like all kinds because we ran out of things and we still needed to get them through. But like Stephanie said, it was mastery path, after mastery path, and it really helped those kids prepare and learn for that standardized test, and they enjoyed it a lot. And the winning team got a galactic pizza party at the end of the semester. It's exciting. So my next big adventure is to gamify our campus.

You know, I talked about the finishing courses on time with abbot an attendance problem as well. I'm gonna pull in a lot of these things to encourage them with that extrinsic motive motivation and maybe that it will become intrinsic. So I'm excited about that. So, hey, stay tuned on the blog if I have time to actually type it in there. So some of the things that we do include in our courses I just started brainstorming a list, mastery paths, of course.

And if you're not familiar, that's definitely a great differentiation tool to use. Quiz banks, of course. I think most of your courses should have quiz banks, and that's another place you can kinda get derailed and and stack spend a lot of time instead of moving forward and getting crap on a page. Thank you. They, but you soon as those kids take one test and it's ten questions, everybody has those ten questions for the next, time that course is, deployed.

So quiz banks are are helpful. But you can just run through the list. One of my favorites is Go Guardian. We it's something that we use in, in our instance, but the district does not It wouldn't make sense for them, but it creates a dashboard for our, our teachers to see our students course progress. And so they're a vendor here.

Y'all should go talk to them. It's a very if you're using courses for original credit and, you know, and not, just as a blended learning piece. This would be a really great thing to add, but lots of things that we do, use in our courses. And so then, the review plan, the courses are built. You know, we're gonna review these.

Not quite built, I guess, but we just use Google. We have Google and we are Microsoft districts, so we're very spoiled if you can't tell already. But I just, in a shared drive, I put folders for our contents, and then within those, we have our, individual courses. It's gotta be in a shared drive because if a teacher leaves, and they've been putting go Google assignments in or any Google anything, they leave, it's all gone. And so those are broken in your course.

So then within, one of those contents, this is chemistry, for example, a spot for their keys. So all teachers can can see, you know, what that worksheet key is. Not everybody knows what the notes should be filled in as, if another course writer had built it and then a project's requirements, but you'll see the course map is there. And I shared just this folder with the teacher that's building it. And so they don't have to see the rest of it.

And so the timeline is, this is a project overview for, the course that that that teacher may be building. And so I've got, you know, quick emails so they know who they're supposed to contact, quick links to the courses, all in one place. And then a checklist. Here's our deadlines. Where are we? And those are built in simple spreadsheets that you know, anyone has access to, and they're really easy to customize.

And so you're meeting the needs of your campus or your program. Within that same project requirements, I I do have some general, design recommendations. It's about three or four pages of this, but you know, what your assessment should look like? What should your, homework or assignments look like, etcetera? Just general design recommendations. The numbers on the side are actually quality matters rubric standards. So I just added them to see if I was covering all of that as well.

So several of these, and you'll you'll have this presentation, later. I'm like, let's read them all one by one. Create by week. No. So several of those things.

Then another page in that sheet is or sheet in that worksheet is communication. So back and forth. What do you first module. So I'll start communicating with somebody. Hey, that's a good idea.

You know, here's my notes. But then notes for the course writer to return to me. So we can have that communication going back and forth. This then is the entire building project. So this is a one page project manager page.

I'm gonna show you the book where I got this from. And I like it because then we can kinda see the heat map Right? What's going on? What who's behind? And how do we need to encourage them to to get it together? Or do they need assistance help, etcetera? Again, I love drop downs. Can you tell? I love spreadsheets and I love drop downs. This oh, sorry. That note, that, that project manager document I mean, it's something that can be applied to any project that you're working on.

We ever since she showed this me. We really love it. We use it in a lot of different places, and it is so helpful to keep massive projects, you know, all visible in one location, and especially when you have multiple people working on it. It was very beneficial. So you see that you can assign owners and helpers there.

If you get the you really should get the book if you're interested in this because it really explains this in a lot better detail. But you might have a helper that's a letter B, another helper that's a letter C, You just can see it in one page, and you you bring that up weekly to see what's what's happening. So that's the book It's very it's very thin, easy read. Then that final review we just have a spreadsheet like most probably do and the link directly to the course. And here we go.

Okay. We're gonna import the content. We're starting to look through all of these things that need to be done. When we get a course from Katie Virtual School, we have to customize it in a way that again for our students. And so we run these through, this spreadsheet.

It's like five pages long. So, again, you you can come up with your own standards to check off. I feel that real quick on that one. And it's important to know that these are standard items, every one of those columns that you're going to do repeatedly in all of your courses. I mean, making sure your teacher profile page is updated, making sure that your links have all been verified and validated.

So all of those things are things that you're doing, and and this right here is the key to how to mass produce those courses when, I mean, every single course is linked right there on that first list. And then you can go across and and we put a team together right before school started last year. I mean, we were all in there going through these courses. You click on the course, you check for that. It's done.

You check for this, not done, still in progress. And it allows you to get a team, and and I'm not even in the same building as them, it allowed us to get a team together of people who were knowledgeable about what needed to happen and all pitch in and work in an organized fashion so that we knew it was being completed, and we knew it was being completed exactly the way we needed it to be. So once that course is ready to go, then it's that launching of the course. And so here are the things that we need to have expect patients for, your teachers need to update their homepage in their syllabus, and they'll meet the teacher, you know, this checklist for those instructors at this point. Having expectations for grading and giving feedback And while you set those expectations, then you've gotta have some kind of a check.

And so, Oh, well, I'll talk about the check-in a minute. As you deploy, there's gonna be things that are wrong. As much as you've vetted it, as much as you've gone through it, gonna be a broken link. There's gonna be something that doesn't make sense. And so we actually created our in house, an in house ticketing system.

And we just did that with a Microsoft flow. I don't know how to do it right now, but our now current online learning specialist does, and she has come up with this using that flow. Microsoft, has instructions. Google it. Wow.

That seems a little Google the Microsoft. Okay. So the ticket system then, we is a form that then sends a task to those ladies there and they fix it. So we had called it a fire form, because it was like a dumpster fire at the beginning of the year. And so course issues, they can click on that easy to fill it out, and then we can fix things.

So the then that launching, and and doing a walk through. So at our campus, our teachers are on Canvas one hundred percent. So someone needs to be looking at what they're doing. So we go through a camba created a canvas course walk through. And so it's just again things.

You've set the expectations, then have a checklist so that they know that you are kinda dipping in. Even your best teachers are gonna get lazy and just do weird things, like give hundreds for blank pages or you know, change grades to because they feel bad for the kids. Well, no. So this is, just an idea. That as well.

When, talking about the online walk throughs, it's so important to remember, you know, for your administrators or your your campus leaders that you still have to do those observations of those online classroom environments. And, a couple of years ago in COVID, we had to launch very quickly a, third let's see. K through fifth. It's k through sixth. K through yeah.

I was a coordinator for it. I can't remember. It's a blip. A k through six program, and I we had to pull teachers from all over retired teachers to teach these, you know, courses and launch it quickly. So it was really important to know what was going on in those classrooms.

So having a, not only a visual, but also getting into those classrooms, hopping into their Zoom sessions, saying what kind of things were being discussed, just really added value to the learning experience and gave us an opportunity to guide and redirect and teach and coach as needed. So important things to remember, those observations are just as if not more important in the online environment as they are in the face to face and so, this all is helping to combat that teacher shortage. And non mechanical. So as we know, teacher shortage is something that hit all of us really hard. And one of my jobs in my current role is to serve as a liaison between, the district leadership and the campus teams.

And so that means a, I go beg for money when we need resources that have not been available. I I was a former debate coach, so I I guess that's why they put me in charge of that. You know, just really making sure that we're begging people who have the money to give it to the kids who need it and for the resources that they need it for. But also it gave me an opportunity to, know that there are ways that we can combat this teacher shortage. Yet last year right about this time, I got a call from the deputy superintendent saying that we are short multiple junior high Spanish teachers.

And it was problematic because as you know, school starts in a couple of weeks, and we didn't have a teacher to teach these students. But in a former role, I was a coordinator for Katie Virtual School, and I knew that we had out a Spanish one course, but it had not been utilized yet. And so we had that collaboration between the team to get that course content And I also knew that we have multiple Spanish one teachers in the district who were certified to teach online, who were not doing it at the at the moment. They, you know, had thought about doing it in summer, but then the course didn't launch. So now we had teachers trained courses sitting unused, And I said, well, can we do that? And so that's that's where we went.

We started out with that course. We expanded to a couple of other courses we needed, and we use those opportunities for not only to increase, you know, teacher income revenue opportunities but also to provide learning experiences for kids when we didn't have anyone available to teach them. So we gathered we sent out an APB and told RT that were certified in both, we asked if they would be interested in teaching online a couple of different, you know, a class or two extra than what they were teaching, you know, outside of their contract area. And we told them that we'd pay them. And the average rate for a online teacher in our district is a hundred dollars per student, per semester.

So it it doesn't sound like an stream amount, if you're thinking about the whole semester, but if you have twenty five students in your class, you know, and you're teaching two sections in addition to the regular school What teachers do you know that actually go home at the end of the day anyways? You can just stay a little longer, support their students asynchronously, and they give themselves a five thousand dollar raise a semester. The school district wins because we're not hiring a whole another staff, a whole another full time employee with benefits because there aren't any to hire. So it's a win win and it works out really well, and what this looks like in the, well, and the students are getting quality online learning from courses that have been vetted and developed by our district. Yeah. And so, and what this looks like is that students are enrolled in an asynchronous online course it's called the instructional school day virtual course, and they're enrolled in a steady haul period during the school day.

And so teachers, like I said, are supporting students asynchronously, and online and outside of their contract hours. So this has given us the opportunity to cover unfilled teacher positions, open up every course in our course catalog for each of our nine about to be ten high school campuses. You may have a student, you know, five students on a campus who want to take creative writing. Well, that's not enough to put a teacher in a classroom to support those five students. But if you have five students on three different campuses that want to take that course, it's feasible to take fifteen students and put them in a course with one online teacher and let her or him support them asynchronously.

So it's providing teachers with the opportunity to increase their income then giving us the chance to maintain consistent quality in our online courses. And one more commercial break. I have a lot of resources in the community, and, these are all infographics and hacks and tutorials and whatnots in here, two fours. Yeah. So those are just some of the titles like ten hack ten grading hacks or ten, I don't remember them all now. You go look. But I did a tiny URL or the, QR code.