Our Journey into Early Years Online Training
In August 2020 Growing Together developing early years launched our first ever early years online training. Our first event was our webinar ‘Childhood Trauma and Covid-19’. I was filled with nervousness as I logged onto the online webinar platform to do my first ever early years online training. After many hours of preparation, reading and more importantly practise and talking the topic through with anyone that would listen to me. Apologies to all of those friends who are not early years focused!
Early years online training was a completely different experience to my previous training I have delivered, which has been face to face and you can read peoples cues of engagement and easily get that interaction. For many of my first webinars, I felt like I was just chatting away to myself as I could not see anyone on the other side until we stopped to do activities; this was a new and strange feeling for myself.
I was so excited to receive some amazing reviews from our first series of webinars, which gave me the confidence to keep going. Susan and I are so excited by how much this early years online training has grown and developed and we really appreciate all of the feedback we have received as we continue to develop our webinars series and support professionals working in the early years sectors.
It is absolutely crazy to think that we now offer a range of early years online training as we are continuously releasing new webinars. Did you know since that very first webinar in the beginning of August 2020 we have run an amazing 58 webinars?! Even more incredible is that we have many more planned for the new year! You can check them out here by clicking on our link to our online training on the website.
In a year that has been very challenging for everyone around the world, as we social distance, lock down and spend more time on our own. This has really opened up a world for online training, and although we miss the opportunity of the physical coming together of training and having a chat over a cup of coffee or tea. We have seen the power and value of the early year’s community coming together online in our webinars, people pushing themselves out of their comfort zone and turning the videos or microphones on. Learning a new way to work, share ideas and connect with one another. What an amazing privilege we have had as a company to bring professionals across the early year’s community together in our online training.
We have spoken to people from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Omen, Malta, India, Dubia, Australia, Finland, America and China, just to name a few places. Wow, what an incredible opportunity we have had to bring people together who have a passion and care for early years through our online training all over the world. We would just like to take the opportunity to thank you for being a part of this online training journey with us. We can’t wait to continue to develop our online training for the early years more.