Challenges/Solutions:
𝕂𝕖𝕧𝕚𝕟: Consistency: “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.” Since Kevin isn’t the only person making tutorials at Poudre School District, he acknowledges that “Different people make different tutorials in different ways, and everything looks kind of different. And iorad makes it all look the same, which is really, really important for our end users that are trying to learn these software… and gain trust, gaining their trust so they can learn from us.”
Keeping up with software changes: When updates to software occur, “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.” Kevin sees that software interfaces change so frequently, and with iorad “I’m able to remove steps [in an iorad tutorial] really easily but not have to take it down off my website and then get the embed code and put it back up again, so just how easy it is to do everything [using iorad], and it’s truly a lifesaver.”
𝕋𝕦𝕖𝕤𝕕𝕒𝕪: Sporadic users: She has a totally different audience from Kevin and Bryan because her audience is approximately 75 office staff. She’s also often helping repeat users, for instance when someone does a task only once a year and needs to be reminded each year how it is done. An iorad is easily accessible to help.
Work from home: The switch to working from home situations has forced a lot of tech-related questions to surface for Tuesday that users might have been getting by using their school site tech before, and now they’re at home. For example, they can’t access a particular website, and now “Once we get somebody set up and good-to-go, they are …good for a while.” It might be no exaggeration to think that ITs use has increased by ten-fold in the last six months, so the challenge is, “We’re just figuring out how to support those people doing the same tasks but just at home now.”
Personal Identifiable Information: Another challenge iorad solves for them “… that made us all go ‘Oh SNAP’ … [is] … the ability to mask data because, when we are looking at student fees and student … data … , if we can just click and drag and mask data, and then it has the mask at every step option where you can just check that box, and it’ll mask everything… that saves so much time.” “That [masking] tool made us all kind of gasp and go, ‘Oh my gosh, we don’t have to redact stuff anymore? Yea!’ That’s my favorite thing.”
𝔹𝕣𝕪𝕒𝕟: Diverse learner levels: In addition to the 2000 teachers and classified instructional staff, Bryan also trains IT staff, non-instructional staff, such as bus drivers, and now community members, too. That’s an additional 1,200 people. During the conversation, Bryan said Tuesday “nailed it” regarding the challenges that iorad solved. He added that they no longer have to make presentations out of screenshots. “[iorad] throws out an end result that looks really sharp and works again for a lot of different people.”
Processes:
𝕋𝕦𝕖𝕤𝕕𝕒𝕪: Tuesday’s department has named their Help Center “The Safe.” It is filled with financial resources that constantly need updating. Their old process used to involve creating web pages of screenshots inside The Safe; instead, they now just have a link to the iorad Help Center on the web page, and users can explore the Help Center as needed. Their one point of access Help Center has many different categories, so users only have to go to one place, and “Users can find their specific ones really quickly. … I think the category options really help people find what they need to find.” Tuesday stated the obvious, that it’s easier to update a tutorial than it is to update a SharePoint web site.
𝕂𝕖𝕧𝕚𝕟: Kevin often puts together a quick iorad because a teacher needs to know how to do something. This is much different from teaching a live professional development training with too many things to cover in the allotted time (“plus, I hate doing live demonstrations in front of people’’), so he builds as many iorads as needed — one for each part of the application he wants to present — and embeds the iorads into a Google Site. He shows participants how to use the different Modes, so they can practice in a lot of different ways. “I’ve been getting into the habit of [putting a] permanent clipboard piece that I put in the front of all of my iorads that direct people to look up and see that there’s a way to change it [the player] between all of the different modes.” He’s then able to tell his audience, “Here’s what this application does; go do these things on your own.”
𝔹𝕣𝕪𝕒𝕟: For Bryan’s asynchronous classes, he uses PowerPoint presentations, and then puts the links to the iorads in there, so the learners can read about it and then go do it. “Any time that we can have people feel like they’re learning something by doing it with that content, and content that didn’t take us that long to create, all the better.” He likes to use the Steps List format for sharing iorads, to start with documentation first, “because what we’ve heard from our users, they definitely want to have those steps. … The cool thing is, by the time they get to the end of the steps, there’s the interactive piece, so they can still quickly get in there and experiment with a different way to absorb that content.”
Results:
𝕂𝕖𝕧𝕚𝕟: Show what you know: They are up to about 20 asynchronous professional development classes now that are ready to go. He likes that whatever iorad they make for one person, they can use it with so many others. His next goal is to experiment with the Quiz it feature because of his technical skills quizzes; he knows it will be so much more efficient to have an iorad Quiz than taking screenshots and writing quiz questions, especially because “then I don’t need to come up with distractor answers; I just need them to show if they can do it.”
Flexibility: Kevin likes how a teacher who is gradually teaching students how to do something, “the teacher can just keep building on that tutorial, and make it a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger rather than having a bunch of different tutorials … you can gradually dig into higher level content with it. … That’s the beauty of it. It’s so fast and so easy.”
Support: “Just to know that iorad’s got my back” for the kind of training that he likes to provide. Kevin’s iorads “… are used more like in the exact moment … right in the moment; it’s not just like a practice run. … Everything is so consistent, and people have said ‘thank you’ for that consistency.”
𝔹𝕣𝕪𝕒𝕟: Diversified training: Like most trainers, Bryan also deals with a diverse group of people with different skills, some more tech-minded than others. He is able to use his iorads on both of his two sites that are digital repositories; one is a community tech portal, and the other is the IT Tech Hub. He said that one of the nice things about iorad is that “it allows you to cater to those groups without you having to do anything else different.”
𝕋𝕦𝕖𝕤𝕕𝕒𝕪: Professional results: “I like that, when Kevin said it looks sharp, it kind of has like a template look, they all look the same, whereas if [the four people on my team] four different people are creating walkthroughs using screenshots in Word, it’s going to look all over the place, but now we can all go to one place, and we can create a walkthrough, and it’s going to end up looking exactly the same as if the same person created it.”
Kevin: “There’s other solutions out there that do similar ideas, but not as easily as iorad.”
What have you had more time to do now that iorad has cut down on the time needed to create content?
𝔹𝕣𝕪𝕒𝕟: “The ability to separate content out so that people can do it on their own schedule, so that you can focus on something else that needs a little bit more of that one-on-one questions being asked and things like that; it’s really empowering, and it makes you feel like you’re giving people what they want without sacrificing what you want to get to that’s also important.”
𝕋𝕦𝕖𝕤𝕕𝕒𝕪: Because she works with small groups and large groups, she likes that it’s helpful to be able to put [iorad] in a PowerPoint and say, “If you want more info, just go to these links here. People can check out what they want to check out, and people don’t have to sit there through a walkthrough of something they might already know. … We’ve had time for our trainings and workshops to just be tighter and more together and more focused on what people actually want to hear versus boring walkthroughs.”
𝕂𝕖𝕧𝕚𝕟: Kevin used to have to start with the basics at every training even if some participants didn’t need that support. Now he can ask people to do an iorad BEFORE a work session to learn the basics, so that when they are there in front of him, he “can really dig in … to the higher level features of other applications and really use the tools for all the benefits that they have instructionally because they’ve had the tour of the basics done.” Kevin knows this model is working for him and for the participants; “Participants were giving me higher level questions than just how to log in, like they were at the level even of trying to break the software because they were actually using it and all the features and finding the program’s limits and finding workarounds for the limits. Those were the kinds of questions that were able to be asked [by participants]. Moreover, Kevin said that it’s been “fulfilling” to do those kinds of trainings. “People are now coming to me with different kinds of questions, and I believe it had something to do with the iorad somehow building up those basic skills.” With the addition of iorad to his training model, Kevin has been able to gather this qualitative data for something that’s often difficult to quantify.
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Tuesday Downey, Accounting Technician for the Finance Department, is part of the customer service support team for the district’s financial users, such as the office managers and bookkeepers, in the district’s 56 schools. Tuesday uses iorad to train on programs for revenue, credit card expenditure, and financial software for the district.
Bryan Lamoreaux, Information Technology Trainer, creates the documentation for help guides for the district, manages a community tech portal for parents, students, and the community at large, and provides 1-on-1 training in-person and remotely. Bryan uses iorad in all of these situations, especially since he trains about 2000 teachers and classified instructional staff.
Kevin Murray, Professional Learning Coordinator, focuses on edtech, including student creation and collaboration software. Kevin uses iorad to develop many tours on the instructional side of edtech to use in 1-on-1 and small- and large-group instruction for the district’s instructional staff.
