This morning I joined in a Japanese class where a teacher in an Adelaide suburban school was taking a class of 6 students in rural West coast school. My role was mentor/helper. We were using an instance of Live Classroom in an edna Sandpit Group. Live Classroom is a web-conferencing plug-in to Moodle which we have been getting to know for much of this year in the edna Sandpit groups. Last week we used it for the edna 10th birthday celebrations and you can check that out through the archive if you like. The archive will give you a rough idea of what happened and how we were able to use the tool.
This morning’s class illustrated, among other things, that when you have managed to get your students logged in, teaching a class online is actually very different to the face to face scenario.
So when this complimentary white paper came to my attention today, it seemed very opportune. Web Conferencing’s Expanding Role in Training talks about a “fundamental paradigm shift” getting underway. It describes the results of a survey of 533 trainers concerning the usage levels, benefits, and justifications for webconferencing as a training application. It finds that 70% of trainers believe web conferencing is more than or just as effective as synchronous tools.
The students in the classroom this morning definitely enjoyed their experience and what happened in the session only just scraped the surface of possibilities.
Last week in the edna 10th birthday Live Classroom, the possibilities for teacher professional development were well illustrated. We listened to a live audio feed, looked at some slides, and experienced live and text chat.
The Web Conferencing article talks about how saving on travel costs is given as the top reason why people use web conferencing for training. This is closely followed by the ability to reach people who could not otherwise participate.
The edna Groups team have played around with this aspect this year with Group Owners Online, a series of 1 hour online workshops we ran in Live Classroom at http://sandpit.edna.edu.au/course/view.php?id=60
In the sessions we used a set of powerpoint presentations about modules and activities in edna Groupsa.
Next year the edna team are conducting another round of workshops about edna and its tools in each state. These will be mainly capital city face-to-face events, but for June 18 we are planning a no-cost online conference with a key note speaker, break out sessions, the lot! We will offer sessions that parallel the ones we are running in the face-to-face conference. We will be encouraging participants to enrol for the conference in the usual way but to login from home, or at the very least to convince their principal that it is ok to spend that day at a conference online.
I remember doing this once at the school I was at. The school librarian organised a group of us to attend an online conference and we huddled around a single computer listening in. The other staff and students found it very difficult to understand that we were not to be interrupted. After all we were only listening to something.
I know the idea of organising a totally online conference is not new. There has been a great one at http://k12onlineconference.org/ in the last two years, but for edna it will be quite a first but hopefully just the beginning…
Post a Comment