Embracing a New Era
We created our website with the goal of preserving and presenting the clinical documentation and the teaching materials that Big Bob devoted his orthodontic teaching career developing. It was important to us to continue to share his work with his students and to insure that his philosophy, mechanics and techniques are available to all who desire to further their own orthodontic education. Our original thought was to use our ortho website to present Bob's cases, and have we ever exceeded that objective! We launched our website in 2010 with a sampling of cases in the Case Library and session one of the Online Comprehensive Ortho Course completed. By the time we celebrated our first birthday, we had expanded the Case Library and added higher resolution pictures, enhanced the Forum to allow members to upload pictures, added the News Article section and the Calendar of Events. But our biggest achievement was completing all four sessions of the Online Comprehensive Ortho course.
Last year as we celebrated our first birthday we vowed not to rest on our laurels, and we haven't! Now that we are celebrating our second birthday we have very exciting additions and enhancements to our website to share with you. During this last year we set our sights on insuring that Gerety Orthodontic Seminars is truly a complete package, offering you an option to meet all of your orthodontic education needs. We are so proud and excited of all the strides we took toward achieving this goal, both through our website and by offering ortho seminars in the classroom again.
The response to our Online Comprehensive Ortho Course exceeds anything we could have wished for, and we so appreciate our new "cyber-family". Bob and I have been so devoted to teaching this same material in classrooms across the country for so many years and it has been a passion for us to continue to have it available online. During the original production of the online orthodontic course we learned many ways that we could make it even better, which we did this year. We concentrated on re-doing session one and implementing the upgrades that we had perfected as we completed the other sessions. If you have purchased Session One of the Online course you have automatically received the upgraded version, which is a true benefit to the online experience; as we make improvements and add new information you have immediate access to the improvements. If you haven't had the opportunity to be introduced to the online course just contact me through the website and I will gladly provide you with a free preview of our online ortho course.
In an effort to help guide visitors through the website and explain all the information and services that are available we created The Virtual Tour, which was fun for Big Bob, Grant and I to tape together. We also established The Testimonial Page so that we could share all the kind comments that we have been receiving from our students and post some great pictures of our participants and events.
As we promised, we have continued to expand the Case Library using all new high resolution photos. Big Bob's Case Library now has a catalog of 19 cases, with 3 more coming soon! Each of the cases contain pre-treatment photos and records, photos and a synopsis of each treatment, and post treatment photos. We are so proud of the Case Library and of the work that Bob has done as a clinician that we are offering 2 free access cases on our home page to share with everyone interested in learning about Big Bob's mechanics.
A large part of our efforts to provide a complete package for your ortho education has been to bring our Comprehensive Orthodontic Education Program back into the classroom. We had a tremendous class of bright and enthusiastic doctors graduate in May and we have just started with a brand new class in Tulsa. In conjunction with the doctors course we are offering both a Basic and an Advanced Assistant Training in the spring of 2013. In addition to the Comprehensive Program we have added a Case Finishing Course to our curriculum too! We had such a positive and fun experience last August with the Case Finishing Course at the Hard Rock Hotel in Tulsa that we have decided to make it an annual event and hope to see all of our past students there! To help us with the logistics of our classroom orthodontic courses we have partnered with our friends at Straight Wire Seminars to present our onsite programs, and we are thrilled to be back in action.
Our most exciting news is coming later this month when we will be offering a complete catalog of online mini ortho courses. We are finishing production now on 14 modules from our online Comprehensive course, with each module focusing on a specific topic. Each of these mini ortho courses will offer a varying number of CE credits, with most of them including hands-on projects as well as lecture. These are a wonderful opportunity to pinpoint your ortho education and to use for the training of your staff as well. We will be announcing the addition of these mini ortho courses soon!
More good news, also coming this month is our first online ortho workshop, The Wide Wonderful World of Archwires (www-archwires.) Because we want to celebrate our birthday with our membership, this workshop will be our special gift to each our members to show our appreciation for your continued support of our website. We will be announcing the launch of this workshop soon!
We are looking forward to continuing our efforts to offer a complete orthodontic education package for our students and are dedicated to improving and enhancing our website as we move into the future. We are working diligently to provide the same high quality orthodontic education to the general dentist that Big Bob Gerety presented for so many years based on Commitment, Integrity and Excellence.
