Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Training Course hell.....

Today's training course was a refresher course on Learning Platform administration. When the email came through a couple of months ago this seemed like a good idea. After all, wasn't the initial plan for the summer term at work to spend the first half term doing email changeover and school blogging and the second half term to actually start the work on the Learning Platform? So a refresher on the LP admin would be a good thing. That was the theory anyway.

Of course, in practice I found myself drowning in work stuff, with the plan to not do much (if any) work stuff at home working well but putting me behind in what needed doing. So a day out re-learning stuff on the Learning Platform suddenly seemed a complete waste, especially when I knew the training day rule applied - anything learned on training days that isn't immediately applied is almost instantly forgotten and will need to be re-learned when actually tackling the problem. So, with permission from the boss I decided to just go for the morning and duck out at lunch to get back and do the more important stuff.

And I was glad to get out. The content was just ridiculously basic, all stuff I knew anyway and none of the difficult stuff was dealt with. To make matters worse we found ourself trapped in a room with that annoying teacher stereotype - the far too loud, know-it-all type who spent 10 minutes talking about what they'd done in their school with the learning platform so far during the usual round of "let's introduce ourselves to the room" rubbish. And how, pray tell, had she managed to do so much with the learning platform - simple - she just did it all at home. No life. No life. No life. I had to leave at lunch just to avoid saying something very unprofessional to her.

But it's no help to me. I've spent the first three months of the year working far too many hours getting the school website done with lots and lots of hours working on it at home. But at least with that I knew there was an end in sight. It had to be done by the end of March. With the learning platform the end is at least 3 years away, if it ever really ends. There's no way I can commit to it in the way I did the website and I've decided it's something I'm only going to work on at school. So I'm going to be pushed to find 10 hours a week to work on it. Not enough. But it will have to be enough.

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