A Handsy Wrestling Match: Week 1

What a wild ride it’s been! The past week has proved both exciting and challenging. Becoming an online teacher is not for the faint of heart. Not if you are becoming an online teacher in a company as fast-growing as Aventa Learning.

After spending a couple weeks eating up my Mentor's online courses, I tip-tapped my fingers, charged and waiting at the gate, for my first course to open up. The training program was so complete and the time I was given to review another teacher’s course seemed a near-perfect model in teacher-training. After all the tutorials, pdfs, and Elluminate Live! sessions, had Aventa Learning spit out the perfectly trained teacher? "Not quite yet," I would have to tell myself by the week's end.

My first course came across the wire sizzlin’ hot and ready to be man-handled by me on Monday. I got straight to work setting up my new course, a process I had been exposed to repeatedly in the three formats aforementioned. It was a handsy wrestling match between me and the html world. Next came my students… marching in… one, by one, by one. All three! ;) It wasn’t long and they were shooting assignments at me left and right yet I was still trying to make heads or tails of this whole Blackboard thing. My desk was askew with binders, papers, pens, & sticky notes. My browser tab was littered with Mail, Blackboard, Aventa Front Office, (shhhh…and Pandora). With a wipe of my brow & a smile each day, I ransacked my systems of management to practice meeting the needs of online learners. It was going to take time, it seemed to learn the subtle nuances of this online environment.

It all came down to my Mentor. Patient, accessible, and chocked-full of all sorts of Aventa Learning Magic, she helped me utilize all of my training in, what I thought, was a pretty darned seamless manner. The perfectly-trained online teacher? I need a few more wrestling matches before I can even sniff around that title.

What’s next? --Moodle Training! I’m strappin’ on my headgear.