Rural Tech Educator

      Five years ago when I began teaching, I started noticing how education loves acronyms. I still don't know what everyone means, but I do know what STAAR means and now I know about ESSA.      Created by the Obama Administration in 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB). T he ESSA requires states and districts to ensure that all students, including children with disabilities, English learners, and other historically underserved groups, graduate high school ready for college or a career (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). To measure progress against that goal and maintain a critical focus on educational equity and excellence for all, the law maintains the requirement that states administer to all students annual statewide assessments in reading/language arts and mathematics in grades 3-8 and once in high school, as well as assessments once in each grade span in science for all students and annual English language ...

       When COVID-19 hit in the spring of 2020, I remember our school district scrambling to get technology for all students to finish a school year. Teachers were required to use Google Classroom to post assignments. Students without internet were able to sit outside on benches and have access to school WIFI. Google Chromebooks were quickly ordered and issued to students who needed them. Little did we know this was a sign of things changing.      While the pandemic may have dwindled, the technology implemented during that time has not. In fact, educational technology has become more prevalent in classrooms. “I believe that the integration of information technology in education will be further accelerated and that online education will eventually become an integral component of school education,“ says Wang Tao, Vice President of Tencent Cloud and Vice President of Tencent Education (Li and Lalani, 2020).      Tao was correct. Dr. And...

      One of the benefits of eLearning is how it can cater to a wide variety of learning styles and needs. The use of videos really brings lessons to life and helps to engage the audience.      Here are some tips to help prepare for video production:      1.  Outline the content to be included in the eLearning video. Begin by making a detailed outline of what the eLearning video should include, all the  visual elements  that are absolutely necessary in order to convey your message, as well as the activities to be included in your eLearning video.     2.  Match your video to the eLearning content. One of the most challenging aspects of integrating a video into your eLearning course is to figure out how it can most effectively serve the end learning objectives or goals. At which specific point of the eLearning course do you plan to incorporate it? Which specific objectives does it cover? While an enterta...

     The world of eLearning has quickly become a part of our day-to-day lives. Just today, I signed up for a online professional development training for this summer on how to organize my classroom better. As a teacher living in rural West Texas, I find eLearning wonderful! It's nice to be able to save some fuel money, and get the training, or learning, I need right from my classroom.      However, if a person were to design an eLearning course, it's easy to feel inundated with the number of educational applications out there. The sheer amount can be overwhelming, and a person can struggle with not only selecting the right tool, or software, but also how to utilize the tool, or software, for their purpose.       An e-learning authoring tool is a software that enables you to create learning content and share it with your learners. Just as you might use Microsoft Word to write up documents or Microsoft PowerPoint for presentation slides, y...