Become a "Certified Educator"

When I became a computer technician in 1997 everybody was talking about different certificates. The two major ones were MCP and MCSE that was provided by Microsoft. They served as a warranty that you knew your stuff in a certain area and they can be compared with authorizations that are common in the car industry. It is now possible to become a certified teacher at Microsoft and Google and I recently received my Google certificate.

---

The first time I heard about THE Microsoft Certificate, I honestly thought it mostly sounded somewhat cute, but not much more than that. I thought about the extensive training that is often combined with Microsoft's certifications and I thought (stupidly enough) that this was some cute mini-variation they had created mostly for advertisement. When I started looking at the education (I wanted the cute batch!) I started to realize that this wasn't some light version after all, this was for real.

Since my municipality uses Google Education Suite instead of Microsoft Teams, I checked if Google had a certificate and they did (of course). I started to work my way through the different modules and even though there was a lot of advertising (that can not be denied!), it was also a lot of sensible and well-thought-out content about everything from different tools to security levels in the systems and recommendations for dealing with cyberbullying. It felt good that the whole education was in Swedish because even though I can communicate in every day in English, technical expressions can be difficult in your second language. To my great joy (actually!) the certification test was not so easy at all, but I passed it! I felt like it will mean more to me when it didn't come so easy, so I'm glad about that!

To help me during my studies, I found a private group on Facebook where everyone studied for the certification exams at different levels and the atmosphere in the group was really nice. You'll find the group here:
www.facebook.com/groups/googleteachers
  
Google and Microsoft have certificates at several different levels. There are also "badges" and certificates you may be awarded with in your job, but most of them are read to and grazed by one by one. Soon you can have the wall behind your desk covered with lots of neat certificates. Just the way it usually looks at car repair shops. That's cool!


The study guide for Google Certified Educators can be found here:
https://teachercenter.withgoogle.com/certification_level1

The study guide for Microsoft Certified Educator can be found here:
https://education.microsoft.com/sv-se

Maria Rådstam

ICT-teacher

To the blog. . .