This week began with an in-service day, during which two of the Academic Integration Coaches were tapped to train district secretaries on Excel, and district security personnel on the transition to Office 2007.
The Excel training sessions were in the morning. We had worked carefully the week prior to this session to querey all the participants about what they wanted to learn, researched the answers to their specific questions, and created a wiki that covered in detail everything they asked us to cover prior to the session.
With one coach presenting and another floating around the room to assist and troubleshoot, we covered all the topics they requested, including mail merge, charts, graphs, tables, formulas, formatting, pivot tables, and much more. The original plan caleld for us to each teach half of the session to a group of 15, then have the participants switch rooms and learn the other half. Instead, we chose to have all the participants in one room while we took turns presenting our half of the training, enabling us not only to have each other as an assistant, as I mentioned, but also giving us the combined wealth of Excel knowlege of the entire group of participants. These are people who use Excel for their jobs in ways that are different than we presenters use it, so it was great to have a large pool of people to share their own tips, tricks and strategies. There were still some questions that came from the group during the training that we did not know off the top of our heads that could not be answered by anyone in the room, but we researched these after the session and sent answers, along with the link to our session wiki, to everyone as a follow-up the next day. I am very happy with the results of this session. Instead of just delivering training, we worked together with everyone in the group to make sure everyone's questions were answered. I would like to follow this training model again, but maybe also have the participants working on meaningful, job-related spreadsheets in addition to our simulated ones for their hands-on work.
Later in the day, we gave an overview of Word and Outlook to the security staff. The group was in good spirits and willing to learn, and we were able to deliver the content in a shorter time span that we had been allotted, providing the group with lots of time for hands-on "play" with the applications, allowing them to work on documents and projects that were meaningful to them.
There were some glitches with the tech. Laptops didn't always work, connectivity was slow at times, and we had to scramble for extra mice for people who could not use the ThinkPad trackpoint mouse, but the tech staff was swift and effective, and we were able to get everything working and have successful sessions. At times, we're all tempted to criticize the equipment when it doesn't work as quickly or effectively as we'd like, but I choose not to look at the glass as half empty when it comes to this stuff. In the end, we got everything to work effectively, and as I reflected on the day's events later, I found myself instead thinking of how fortunate we are to work in a district with so many computers, laptops, devices and other forms of technology at our fingertips. We all criticize at times when things don't go smoothly, but imagine the alternative of not having access to it at all. We are lucky to have what we have in this district, and along with a little creativity from the participants, presenters, and tech staff, it really enabled us to have an excellent day of learning ... powered by technology.
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