The year following the emergency at home learning in the spring 2020 semester, educators needed an organized platform to provide content and materials to their students online. Administration knew that in the 2020-2021 school year they were operating on a hybrid learning environment with different groups of the student population rotating between being on campus or learning from home. In order to ensure all learners could be successful in the classroom and at home, teachers needed to create a central hub that was easy for students to use and would be uniform in set-up and style across classrooms so as to prevent any further confusion.

I knew from the beginning that this training needed to be as practical as possible for my fellow educators. In that sense, the training was designed with frequent pausing in mind so that the learners could follow along and set up their Google Classroom over the course of this training. The goal being to ensure that they knew how to use the program, but would also be able to walk away having the Google Classroom ready for use when school resumed limiting outside hours needed to have it ready. I was leading the training and would provide consistent check ins for learners as we progressed through the material. 

When deciding on the visuals for this slide presentation, I used one of the many slide template websites which are available online to anyone building a presentation. I chose one with warm, soft colors and not too many distracting elements to ensure the learners would be focused on the lesson. 

When designing the flow of the course, I created a list of elements of Google Classroom from most important to know and least important. I put the most energy and focus into the need to knows ensuring the slides developed for those sections were detailed and visually appealing. I avoided standard bullet points where I could and for most of the presentation used screenshots of Google Classroom with textboxes that I could move on and off screen using animations so as to not overwhelm the learners and allow them to focus on specific pieces one at a time. This also better allowed for questions to be focused for specific features of the program.

An important design element of the course was for the educators to see what everything we were creating would look like from a student's perspective. In order to do so, and to make the course more enjoyable and interactive, I created a classroom for all of my learners in which they would be enrolled as students and they could see for themselves what each piece would look like. Given that the student view was not a standard feature of the program this was a valuable insight which informed their choices in layout and presentation.