As schools closed in March and went remote, educators were tasked with adapting new teaching strategies and online management tools. As teachers and administrators across the country changed course, the heavy weight of doing your best to ensure students’ basic needs were met didn’t come without challenges. Ensuring students are fed, safe, secure, and engaged are not new challenges on educators’ shoulders, but rather the same challenges, only the added obstacle of tackling them from a distance.
As we continue to grapple with the trials of distance learning, we recognize delivering instruction and creating a sense of normalcy through a new medium is one demanding endeavor. We must support educators and equip them with the knowledge and tools they need to do their job the best they can.
Infobase is empowering educators to optimize their virtual classrooms, engage students through distance learning, and employ social emotional best practices to reach the whole child, especially through this complex situation. Online professional development is a great resource to help your educators sharpen their skills so that their students can succeed. In fact, usage on Infobase’s professional development platform has increased by 200% in the last few months. Check out the current trending top course topics.
1. Remote Teaching and Learning
100% remote instruction is new territory for many educators. Two new content modules with best practices for virtual instruction with their students are available. The first module, Teaching in a Virtual Classroom, provides strategies for developing virtual teaching environments conducive to participation, the sharing of ideas, and effective collaboration. The second module, Leading and Engaging Remote Teams, provides strategies allowing school leaders to better manage their teams in virtual settings.
2. Technology Training
Many educators are building entirely new processes and online environments to accommodate our new reality. We help scale these efforts to ensure teachers, support staff, and students are prepared to leverage technology tools to actively engage in the learning process. It is no surprise we are seeing thousands of educators take advantage of courses covering Google (Classroom, Drive, Slides, etc.), Zoom training, and Office 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint).
3. Digital Literacy and Citizenship
Digital literacy helps both staff and students to positively engage in digital citizenship. It is important to ensure teachers have what they need to seamlessly incorporate digital culture throughout a curriculum. Infobase empowers educators with the knowledge and approach they need to ensure students use technology responsibly.
4. Communication and Personalized Learning
Infobase commits to providing schools and districts relevant content to help educators achieve the competencies and demonstrate skills needed to integrate personalized learning into their practice. We are focused on empowering educators to create positive learning environments for their students.
5. Social Emotional Support Strategies
Course topics surrounding SEL, including titles such as Emotional Wellbeing and Stress Reduction Strategies and Connecting Through Vulnerability, have significantly increased in traffic over the past couple of months. Connecting with students and gauging and engaging their social emotional health has arguably become the top priority, and although this is often the kind of support we feel our teachers do best, we must equip teachers with effective strategies for helping students learn to understand and manage emotions, show empathy for others, establish positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.
Online professional development is a key resource for education agencies as they evolve to engage staff and students outside of school buildings. Through this challenging time, Infobase remains committed to supporting educators thought relevant, outcome-based professional learning experiences.
To learn more, please visit our Professional Development and Training Platform product page.
