Learning as I go

When I started teaching, I did alternative certification. I was an athletic trainer who wanted to work at a public high school and I had to teach in order to do that. The program consisted of a few weeks of training in the summer and then being thrown into the classroom in the fall. This began my career of learning as I go. I had a basic knowledge of classroom discipline and lesson planning. Thank goodness for generous teachers in my department who helped me to figure everything out and share stuff with me for class. Years later, I started to us technology in my classes.  My career has been full of examples of "learn as you go". I was one of the first teachers in my school to use an LMS and easily adopted Google Classroom and the Google Suite applications into my classroom. I became a go to person for helping others who had trouble because if I didn't already know how to do something, I would figure it out and then teach everyone else. I had a friend who used a 3D printer in his classroom and I decided I needed one too. Little did I know that I was going to be the person who would have to maintain and repair the printer (and several more after it).

I think if you can learn as you go then you can do anything. All you need is determination, some curiosity, and the ability to write a good Google, and now AI, prompt. We always teach kids about having a learner's mindset. The desire to never stop learning. In today's world, if you can't teach yourself, you are going to fall behind pretty quickly. I am hoping that my ability to teach myself and my desire to learn is going to help me transition out of the classroom and into a new career.

Now, here I am again, learning as I go. I am pretty good with technology and pick things up quickly, but I am still figuring things out. The Google certification program is a good baseline to start with, but there are a lot of things I am figuring out on my own. I have found a few very useful websites that help with design as well as how to use the technology. I was pretty excited last week because I figured out how to do a hover effect on buttons in Figma. It took me one website and a video to get it done.

This week I learned what an onboarding page is. I had wanted to do a tour of my app when you first use it, but had no idea what that was called or how to wireframe it. Tonight, I have been working out some ideas for how I will design the onboarding for my app. I hope that over the next couple of days I can add it to my wireframe and finish up my low fidelity prototype. After that I will get back to the mockup that I have already started.

My goal is to finish the Google UX design certification and get my portfolio organized by the end of my winter break. I have two and a half courses left in the certification. I have plans to meet with a friend to go through my portfolio to get some design suggestions this week. I also need to start working on networking.