TRAINING THE TRAINER

Our school has basically no new teacher orientation. Yes, when new teachers get here in the fall we sit down with them for a few days for something called orientation but when teachers are new, there is so much that gets said that is not absorbed. There is just too much information and then it is coupled with jet lag and it becomes almost hopeless.

The technology aspect of the orientation has been the least productive. Typically it consists of about a half hour that I use to hand out domain/email usernames and passwords and then I quickly introduce everyone to our SIS and Gradebook.

We are revamping our orientation for next year with summer learning opportunity for new teachers and a new setup for new teachers when they arrive. We tried an online summer class last year but got very little engagement so this year we are going about it a little differently. Our newly assigned orientation leader feels that staff will not take the extra step to go to an orientation class website so she wants to take out all extra steps and do things over email and social media (once we can get new staff set up on Chinese Social Media).

I am hoping to get in on this orientation to get more time with teachers than my normal 30 minutes. I am hoping to create a number of videos that can be directly embedded into the emails for staff to watch covering the same important topics that we covered in that 30 minutes but also expanding to topics like our school’s technology mission/goals, what you can expect for technology in China and an overview of available resources and applications we have at school.

In the end, I am not sure how helpful the orientation will be but I am hopeful that we will be able to inspire teachers.