EZ PD: Create and Share How-To Tutorials With Ease

Purpose & objective

Purpose & Objectives
1. Understand the workflow of using a free, online tutorial builder and online community to save time when preparing for professional development teaching and learning.
2. Hypothesize how to integrate the tutorial builder and online community into their personal training situations.
3. Create a sample tutorial(s) during the session they can use as a professional development resource.

This session will directly address the challenge facing edtech integration teaching and learning for professional development support. For someone in a tech coach or edtech support role, much of their time is spent preparing the documentation and training tools for what they teach, creating and maintaining a space for that documentation, and reminding their learners where and how to access that documentation. We will show how the tutorials they create will be accessible to anyone regardless of level or need and allow for learner choice. We will show how easy and convenient it is to keep the training up-to-date, be available as a long-term resource, and support learners beyond physical or geographical settings.
We will show that using the free iorad tutorial creation tool, which has a learning repository and an online community-level resource called the square, PD providers will save time that can then be used to focus on deeper projects. We will be modeling the use of the tool itself and demonstrating all of the ways the PD tutorials created can be shared with their learners under all of the flexible environments they may encounter: in-person, online synchronous, online asynchronous, print or electronic, and on-demand and just-in-time learning.
The instructional activities will result in instantly available, applicable, and adaptable resources for participants’ for individual learning environments. After presenters model the tool, attendees will have hands-on time to learn the tool and create their own tutorial(s). They will also have hands-on time to explore the ways to share their creations with their learners. They will also have hands-on, in-real-time access to a community of tutorial creators, who could also support them or their learners.

Testimonials of the users of the tool provide the evidence of success:
“I remember one of the very first iorad tutorials I sent to our head of student services here at [my] High School, and she's like, “I don't know what that was you just sent me, but that was incredible!” and she thought that I was this genius that had created this whole click here, click here, do this. And she's like, “How did you animate that?” I'm like, “Oh no, that's not me; that's magic iorad!” So I showed her, and she was then able to do it for her students as well, which is really great for a lot of our students with executive functioning disorders or processing disorders to be able to see and hear and do to meet all those modalities is really just incredible.”
“...the ability to follow along and actually click the buttons and do it and type in the boxes and see what that end result is. It is that solidification in your mind of ‘this is the process; this is how I do it; this is what the end result is’ and not having to just watch somebody else do it.”
“Because our district's small, my job is really broad. I do everything and when I also end up doing lots of work with our secretaries, our admin assistants, and most of those gals are not super tech savvy. They know their computer; they have the lists on the desk: you click here you click here. They like that little list of what to do next and next.”
“With updates to software, instead of having to blow-up the whole document …’How do I get that into a PDF? Where’s the original Word document? Where's the Google Doc?’ …with iorad I can just add in those new steps.”
“The speed at which I can make these tutorials … I want things to look beautiful, and I want things to make sense… because it’s really important to teach the teachers and gain their trust, and if I put out crap, they’re not going to trust me, and they’re not going to learn. And so iorad does both at the same time. All of my tutorials are consistent; they offer that flexibility in learning preferences, and that’s pretty unique.”
“iorad is good because I’m often helping repeat users; esp. when someone does a task only once a year and needs to be reminded each year how it is done.”
“I work with a diverse group of people with different skills: some are more tech-minded and need to go through something a certain way; then you have others who just want to read that doc like a .pdf. So the nice thing about iorad is that it allows you to cater to those groups without you having to do anything else different.”

Outline

60 minute Exploratory Creation lab:
3 minute introduction with accompanying A/V
12 minutes modeling and exploring the tool
10 minutes whole group, peer-to-peer discussion on the application of this tool in practice
30 minutes participant hands-on creation developing the new skill on the participants’ own devices; presenters providing 1-on-1, small group, and large group support
5 minute summary/question-and-answer period

Supporting research

Student agency through choice:
Collier, C. (2022). Becoming an autonomous learner: Building the skills of self-directed learning. Journal of Transformative Learning, 9(1), 111-120. https://jotl.uco.edu/index.php/jotl/article/download/448/369/1482

Active vs. passive learning:
Concord University. (n.d.). Active vs. Passive Learning. Success Resources. https://www.concord.edu/getattachment/Student-Life/CACD/Academic-Success-Center/Success-Resources/Active-vs-Passive-Learning-(1).pdf.aspx?lang=en-US

Learning repositories:
Paskevicius, M. (2021). Educators as Content Creators in a Diverse Digital Media Landscape. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2021(1): 18, pp. 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.675