Technology can help new teachers be more successful in their first years of teaching. Careers are often established or abandoned in those first several years, so it is important to remove hurdles as many as possible. Particularly blended learning, amplifies teaching effectiveness and learning for students. But before a teacher can get to teaching with technology, often they need to use it as a work tool themselves! Technology used by the teacher as a Type I (versus a Type II) can alleviate the workload for beginning teachers by increasing positive communication and allowing for easy replication of successful lessons.
Organization
Technology can help an educator organize. Teachers can order lesson plans, organize files, and student submissions. The best tool for this is Google Drive. I recommend educators early in their career maintain a separate Google Drive and share between their personal and a school-sponsored Google Drive.
Lesson Plans can be created from a template housed in Google Drive, edited in Google, and then a saved copy to Google Drive and shared with your teammates, mentor, or administrator.
Organize ideas, thoughts, and documents in multiple locations in the cloud. This is portable file cabinet, accessible from anywhere any time. Your backseat can thank me later.
Students can share files to a teacher with a strict naming convention, submit a URL to the teacher, or use a LMS/Google Classroom. This creates more than a paperless classroom, it allows the teacher to have a record of submissions.
Communication
Sometimes the communication between the classroom and home is difficult to manage for newer teachers. The messages sent home via technology must be inline with grade level and building/district-wide practices, but once the message is formed up there are many channels to consider. The channels used to send home information must be known to families and must send receive the same information.
Whatever teachers select, apps or emails, establish a frequency and standard length/contents, and then stick to it! Follow these rules with email, and feel free to rely on teammates for advice. Templates in email and informative signatures can help you spend less time in your Inbox and more time teaching.
Replication
The sheer amount of work a new teacher puts in is staggering. The only thing worse, would be if s/he had to do it again the next year!
Technology can be leveraged to replicate, save, and improve that work of the prior year moving forward! Refer to the myriad of cloud accounts and possibilities, strategize to share online resources with a seasoned educator, and get your Twitter account already!
Every teacher should be stepping through a yearly revision cycle, but the rate of change from one year to the next in the early years of an education career is monumental; revision cycles may happen more frequently.
Technology can alleviate the workload for beginning teachers.
Is there a new teacher you know who could use these tips?
2017-12-23 at 12:04 pm
I completely agree with you on this one. Technology surely helps not only teachers but almost everyone out there in the initial years of career. Good luck 🙂
2017-12-23 at 2:33 pm
So true! There are enough hurdles out there, so the more aspects of work (whether teaching or in other career paths) that can be streamlined by smart use of technology, the better!
2017-12-23 at 2:46 pm
This is great advice. I know a few of the people I trained with struggled in the first few years of teaching and these would have helped them. I would have benefited too but I wasn’t fortunate enough to manage to teach due to my disability. The more help for new teachers the better in my books!!!
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2017-12-26 at 9:02 am
Thanks for sharing these thoughts, Penny! It’s so important to talk about ways to support our new teachers and help them be successful at the beginning of their career so that they can continue to learn and grow.
While these are all important skills for new teachers to learn, I think you should also add “automate administrative and communication tasks” to this list. If teachers automate common tasks like automatically responding to emails and Grading objective assignments, then they will have more time to dedicate planning, assessing, and focusing on students.
2017-12-26 at 9:33 am
I agree JP!
There is so much more we can do for all our teachers. But every teacher knows the special tired, frustration, emotion of beginning teaching!
2017-12-28 at 4:23 am
Thank you for this post. Quite informative and will certainly be of help to schools and teachers looking for edtech software to use. You might also want to check this article out – 5 Steps You can take when you choose an edtech software to use – https://bit.ly/2E7kwb5
2017-12-29 at 2:26 pm
Great article – thanks Penny! What are your favourite apps or software programs to use when teaching?
2017-12-29 at 3:41 pm
Sapna, I try to pick a task first and then look for just the right software. For instance, if Assessing is something I’d like to automate I would try out MasteryConnect, zipgrade, or the quiz feature of a LMS. For content creation: flexbooks, techbooks, iBooks/iTunes. For formative data: Kahoot, Nearpod, Peardeck.
2018-01-17 at 3:00 pm
Really informative, not just this article but the entire website. Will definitely keep checking in.