How a Learning Management System can change a Teacher's life!

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        Someone asked me a question, “How did you use technology to change communication when you were teaching?”

And I went down memory lane. 

      I thought of the biggest challenge for us at an IB school, LMS or a Learning Management System?

    When I was teaching, I got a job with an IB school in 2006, Pathways Word school (School, n.d.) and it was a turnaround for me. One of the things I was introduced to was the learning management system, (veracross, n.d.). I embraced it fully.

    For students, it was a channel of communication of their homework and upcoming assessments. I did away with the school diary and uploaded religiously all classwork and homework on it for them to check. The students were not used to such self-efficacy and would want me to write the homework on the board, like it was done for centuries. I refused and stayed consistent with my approach.

    “When teachers express their feelings with “I-messages”, students are able to understand how they feel and what problems are” (Hue & Wai-shing). The focus was to teach them independence. And I communicated that to them with clarity of thought. I understood that they had to unlearn old habits and gave them space for the same, while staying firm on my methods.

    Eventually it worked as they saw the benefits of it. If they were absent, they could refer to veracross for work done. If they lost worksheets, they could download. I put up past papers and all required study material on it. Soon they un-plugged from me and plugged into veracross! That left the space open for us to develop relationships that did not run around ‘What is the work Miss!’

    Veracross also was the space to upload the assessment scores. Since all calculation was done by the algorithm, I could take as many formative as I wished to and upload them. This changed the curriculum. My assessment turned into continuous as I had no worry of sitting hunched and calculate to find the average!

    Since parents had access to veracross, my updating it regularly helped them to see what was happening in the Maths classes and that helped develop relationship between us. They had the data with them and could reach out anytime they had queries on the same. This gave me the space to learn professional relationships with them. Veracross permitted me to write individual mails to parents with the assessment score.

    And here I found a huge learning area. I would randomly inform parents of scores, great or low, and only when one of them made a panic call that I realised that these are individual who are working and in the middle of their office. Imagine getting a mail in bold “Your child has got a 1 on 10 in Math test!”. This led me to change my way of writing mails. I wrote mails at the end of my day and always started with Dear “…”. It sensitized me. I used veracross to “build a platform for teacher-parent collaboration”, (Hue & Wai-shing)

Conclusion
Veracross was not a learning management system. It was a channel to increase communication with parents, build self-sufficiency in students and learn to be efficient yet sensitive for myself!



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