E-verything!

Introduction

In this recorded session we took a look at if, and how, we use/have used e-polling or surveys. The idea for this session was triggered when I used a poll in the overview for last week’s Serendipity and wondered about the different polling and survey tools that people use.

The Session

We started with a look at whether we had used polling/surveys either as a respondent or as an information gatherer. Then moved on to the platforms on which we have used them, finding that most of us had used polling/surveys on one or more of: Twitter, Facebook, blogs, mobile devices and of course “Other” including Learning Management Systems, Elluminate/BlackboardCollaborate and email!

Then came the most interesting part of the session where we started to look at tools we have used and/or that we know about. We began this by using a whiteboard to name those tools we have used as information gatherer, and as respondent and also those we have heard about.

Next came the best bit where members of the group shared an experience of using a poll/survey tool, We had brief looks at GoogleForms (including a quick play), Facebook, Flubaroo and PollDaddy before running out of time and moving on to our best takeaways from the session. This session flew by and we reached the end far too soon!

Conclusion

This was so interesting – I love to know what tools others are using and to hear about the contexts and purposes. I had a major takeaway in that although I was aware of GoogleForms in a vague way and had responded to polls via that tool I didn’t realise how many different question types there were. Neither had I really taken in the fact that a spreadsheet is automatically created for the answers thus making subsequent data analysis very easy.

Next Webinar

Our next session will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday January 19^that 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday January 20^th at 7am West Aus, mid morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual BlackboardCollaborate room. This is one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic.

Introduction

Our first Serendipity session of the year was a great session! As always the session was recorded and is well worth a watch/listen for the huge amount of sharing of ideas and links. I’m sorry for the delay in posting – a combination of migraines, a visitor staying and too many things still to do before I go back to work has left me without enough time!

The Session

We started as usual by putting our topic ideas on the whiteboard and then polling to choose the topic for consideration. The winner was a double topic “IEP for gifted students” and “Behaviour strategies for gifted”.

Once the topic was chosen we started with a whiteboard for the headings and to collect some of our ideas and thoughts on this including some links. As usual ideas were also shared via text chat and audio. This was a lively session with much of the sharing via audio leaving me with a dilemma about an image/interactive for this week’s post. The whiteboard has only a very small part of those things that were shared as does text chat. So what I have finally done is to experiment with a survey!



While the survey doesn’t give us an image in the post it does give us something different to do and so meets my personal criteria for something other than just plain text in every post

Conclusion

I enjoyed this session – this is one of the topics that we have visited before from different angles and I am always fascinated by the different directions taken when topics are re-visited. Because we never have exactly the same group of people each week Serendipity sessions are truly serendipitous in that our direction is informed by the particular experiences of out participants each week. Love it!

Our Next Session

Our next Webinar is our first Edublogs “Fine Focus” session for 2012, where we invite you to share your favourite online survey tools in “What survey was that!”  join us on Thursday January 12^th at 23:00 GMT/UTC the time for you will vary depending on your timezone (check yours here) Thursday afternoon/evening in the USA, late night Thursday in Europe, and Friday morning January 13^th in Australia – in the usual Blackboard Collaborate virtual room.

Introduction

Warning  – this is not an e-learning related post . As some of you know I sometimes digress into posts about the wonderful part of the world where I live and some of the activities on our block. This is one such post. However it was triggered by a tweet to me from a long time Twitter buddy @plangardengal in California who was one of my earliest contacts on Twitter around three years ago. We have talked gardens, food, animals, and education on Twitter so she knows we have ducks and was looking to talk about some “whys and wherefores”.  Most of this post was the email I sent to @plangardengal – it was really just meant to say “ask away if I can help I will” but as always my fingers ran away on the keyboard and I found myself telling the tale of our ducks.

About our ducks

Again a warning – this is not for the really faint-hearted we do have and breed both “chooks” (chickens) and ducks because we like the meat as well as the eggs and because we like to eat birds that have had a happy life! We started with the “chooks” and a couple of years later added the first ducks to the “flock” again for eggs and also to eat. It seems that here ducks are better “natural breeders/incubators” than the chooks. We use the incubator for chooks but ducks sit and manage their own incubation.

Our original ducks are Muscovies – great layers *huge yolked eggs” tho’ the shells are very hard! These ducks are great characters as well as being larger than the average domestic duck. They can crossbreed but produce infertile offspring when crossed with other breeds. Their incubation is stated as 35 days (having said that our main breeding Muscovy duck takes 38-42 days!)

We absolutely love our Muscovies! They are not only good layers, breeders and tasty eating but are also great characters. Their  temperament is also excellent – calm (as birds go), very non-aggressive and totally relaxed in human company except when protecting eggs. Our first drake was a bit confrontational and bullied the chooks a bit so we swapped him for a better natured one though much older one. Some of our Muscovies are great escape artists – they fly over, climb over and wriggle under the internal dividing chook wire we have in the garden and to divide the chook pens up. So ideally they need fully enclosed runs or you need to fence the veg in as they love to eat emerging young veg!

One of our original bought in birds is our main breeding duck – a fantastic character (Pudddleduck – named for Jemima Puddleduck of Beatrix Potter stories – we don’t name the ones we intend to eat!). She scorns the nest boxes, chooses her own spot – lays and hatches very well (11 ducklings – from 12 eggs -

about 3 days ago & this year another 18 previously over 3 hatches). One of her offspring from earlier this year has also just hatched 4 ducklings (she was only sitting on 5 eggs so that is a good hatch too). At the moment we have two drakes – both are Puddleduck’s offspring and both have now proven fertility with these two recent hatches. We plan to stay with two ducks and two drakes though we really only need one drake, having two reduces the risk of being left “drakeless” if (as happens with all poultry) one suddenly dies.

We also now have Khaki Campbells. We were given 8 fledgling “drakes” one of whom was a duck – so kept her & one drake – they have already bred 8 ducklings. Their incubation is supposed to be 28 days, and as I write Mrs Campbell has just hatched 3 more ducklings. This was a great surprise as we had not expected any success from this batch as we believed that the young from the previous hatch had been sleeping in the nest (before we took them away) and had probably started the eggs into growth prematurely before the duck started to sit.

The Campbells are very different characters from the Muscovies – again great eating and good layers but the two we are breeding from are very nervous in temperament. The group of 8 were all like that – stayed together in a tight bunch all the time, rushed around making lots of noise and kept as far away as possible from humans. These two have calmed a little but not much. We separated off the young (who were showing similar characteristics) when they were a few weeks old and put them in a pen with young chooks. This seems to have had a very good effect in that they no longer rush around in a bunch and they are much less scared of humans. All of our home-bred chooks rush around us and walk on our feet if we are anywhere near them and this influence is being passed on the the young ducks.

Conclusion

The ducks and chooks are all wonderful characters and very entertaining to be around. I was picking figs this morning with several chooks hovering hopefully round my feet in case I should drop a fig when I heard flapping of wings from the other side of the tree. I went to look and found one of the chooks jumping (wing assisted ) to peck at figs on the tree around a metre (just over 3 feet) from the ground! Now I understand why we don’t get many figs on the lower branches. These and similar antics by both ducks and chooks lighten our days and help us keep perspective in the stressful world of education.

Introduction

Well it’s that time of year again and this recorded, session is of the fourth “End-of-year/Christmas” party that we have held online as part of the webinar series!

Will we still be here next year?

Each year when we do this I wonder if the webinars will still be happening for the following “end-of-year”. Perhaps it is time to change the way we do this? When we started webinars were rare and indeed we didn’t even call them webinars at the start! People still come to Serendipity and Fine Focus but there are fewer than in the early days. I feel/hope this is because there are now so many free webinars available and not because we have become boring! These webinars have always been relatively informal with an emphasis on participation, sharing and interactivity. They have been the “first” interactive webinar experience for many, and also for many the first opportunity to present in a webinar. For the moment we are still here – at least for the start of – next year, but whether this was our last “End-of-year” party only time will tell.

The Session

For these “party sessions we encourage people to bring along “virtual” food – an image of food they particularly like – and share this on the “table”.

This year we had a whiteboard to share whether we have a holiday at this time of year, and if we do then what is it called and how do we celebrate it.

The main part of the session is focussed around playing online, interactive, party games. The purpose is not entirely frivolous as they can often be adapted to use in student learning. Interactive games in BbC also serve to illustrate the potential for active participation/ engagement that is so often not used to its full extent in virtual rooms.

We had four games to play. The first one (from @jofrei) pushed the boundaries a bit as her “Guess the Gift” was an App Share of a running Powerpoint – not for the fainthearted or low bandwidth! Our second game was from @philhart and invited us to “rewrite” parts of “The 12 Days of Christmas” from an e-ducator perspective – this generated some interesting ideas! The third game was a “CrissCross” puzzle with a combination of Christmas and Web2.0 clues – this was one I generated using the Discovery Education website CrissCross grid creator – this and their other puzzle generators are a great resource. The fourth game was from @tracywatanabe who got us playing “Find the Fib” – each of us putting up four statements about ourselves 3 truthful and one lie. The others then guess the lie. This has huge potential for use with students where you could ask for 3 true and one false piece of subject knowledge.

Conclusion

These “party” sessions are always fun! The sharing of games always gives me more ideas for ways of keeping things interactive for my students. Now it is time to publish the last webinar overview of 2011. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all who read this and/or have taken part in the webinars – we hope to see you next year

Next Webinar

Our next session will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday January 5^th 2012 at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday January 6^th 2012 at 7am West Aus, mid morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual BlackboardCollaborate room. This is one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic.

Stop Press – last two days of voting #eddies!

We have been shortlisted for the Edublogs awards Thank you so much if you nominated us. And thank you also if you are voting for us.

ONLY TWO DAYS TO GO – deadline 11:59pm US EST Tuesday 13th December. That’s the early hours of Wednesday morning in Europe and late morning/early afternoon Wednesday here in Australia  if you would like to vote for us (Serendipity/FineFocus Webinars in Edublogs award)s click HERE to go to the site, see nominations and cast your vote.

Online End of Year/Christmas Party

We invite you to our End of Year/Christmas Party on 15th/16th December – come along with virtual “goodies” for the festive table, and if you feel inventive bring a game to share and play. Take a look at the overviews for our parties in 2009 and 2010 to see the sorts of things we do. After the party the webinars will be taking a two week break returning on 5th/6th January with the first Serendipity session of 2012!

Introduction

Apologies for the delay in posting – despite starting leave at the end of Friday I have been finishing off a variety of work “loose ends” over the weekend. My holiday begins appropriately with this post. We had a fun session – very Serendipitous and, as always, recorded (though I was a bit late starting the recording – I don’t seem to get a recording reminder in BbC11 as I did in Elluminate10) so you can catch up on what we did it if you missed it!

The Session

We started as usual by putting our topic ideas on the whiteboard and then polling to choose the topic for consideration. The winner was “End of year activities”.

Once the topic was chosen we used a whiteboard to collect some of our ideas and thoughts on this including some links. As usual ideas were also shared via text chat and audio. There were many ideas with Christmas themes around the 12 days of Christmas and collaborative activities such as drawing a snowman. This prompted the sharing of the “Drawastickman” link by Carole (@Coach_Carole).

Never one to pass up an opportunity for playing I opened the link and App Shared it so that we could play out the story collaboratively by taking control of my desktop and taking turns to complete a stage in the story. This was great fun – working via someone else’s desktop is a huge challenge because of the inevitable lag time. Drawing is particularly hard because of this lag and everyone did a great job as we finished the story.

Drawastickman is a nice toy to play with and would be even better if there were a variety of scenarios/themes leading to different stories!

Conclusion

This session definitely put me into a holiday mood! Now I have to come up with a good online game for the party next week.

Our Next Session

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session, in which we let our hair down for the “End of Year/Christmas Party” Bring “goodies for the festive table and if you feel inventive an online party game and join us on Thursday December 15^th at 23:00 GMT/UTC the time for you will vary depending on your timezone (check yours here) Thursday afternoon/evening in the USA, late night Thursday in Europe, and Friday morning December 16^thd in Australia – in the usual Blackboard Collaborate virtual room. Remember we have a two week break after the party and will return on 5th/6th January with the first Serendipity session of the year

Advance Notice

We invite you to our Christmas Party on 15th/16th December – come along with virtual “goodies” for the festive table, and if you feel inventive bring a game to share and play. After the party the webinars will be taking a two week break returning on 5th/6th January with the first Serendipity session of 2012!

PS We have been shortlisted for the Edublogs awards Thank you so much if you nominated us. If you want to vote for us (Serendipity/FineFocus Webinars in Edublogs awards click HERE to go to the site and see nominations

Introduction

This recorded, session was a look at bookmarking. I recently did a session for my colleagues on this and thought it might be worth sharing more broadly through Fine Focus.

The Session

My first task was to find out how many of us use bookmarking and which applications we use. It turned out unsurprisingly that most of us use an application to capture our favourite links. We moved on to look at the two applications beginning with Diigo. I moved all my bookmarks to Diigo a few months ago during the uncertainly about the future of Delicious. I shared my screen to look at and talk about how I am currently using Diigo. I find it works well for me and that the opportunity to highlight and sticky note links is useful because I have a lot of links with almost the same tags so seeing a couple of summarising lines really helps. I am just starting to use groups and was delighted that @TracyWatanabe was with us and willing to talk about how she uses groups extensively.

Moving on to discuss Symbaloo was an interesting contrast because Symbaloo is very visual. Again I shared my screen to show how it enables links to be organised, colour coded, categorised symbolically. It doesn’t work in quite the same way as Diigo in that you don’t simply store a link with a click on a toolbar, you have to create a tile and put it in a webmix (category) which is a bit more time consuming. However you can create great visual collections that you can share with others.

We finished with a brief look at favourite bookmarking apps and how we use them.

Conclusion

I enjoyed doing this session although I felt I that perhaps I should have modified it more – when I talked about bookmarks with my colleagues I was largely talking with an audience who don’t use them so I included the signup. I find the contrast between the two applications is interesting and feel personally that Diigo is the one I will continue to use for most bookmarking but that I will increasingly use Symbaloo for sharing – especially with students because it is so visual!

Next Webinar

Our next session will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday December 8^that 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday December 9^th at 7am West Aus, mid morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual BlackboardCollaborate room. This is one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic.

Introduction

We were a small group this week, however as usual the session was  recorded, so if you missed it you can catch the recording.

The Session

The session followed the usual Serendipity format with a whiteboard for topic ideas from participants and then a poll to choose the topic for discussion. The consensus was for us to merge two topics “Tech toys for motivation” and “Cool tools” and talk about and share some of our personal favourites.

A small group means that everyone has an opportunity to talk on the microphone and this is what we did! We started with a whiteboard on which we wrote some initial tools but soon moved the taking turns to talk about personal cool tools (mainly via audio but with some textchat particularly for sharing links)

When it came to my turn rather than just talk about a tool I Application Shared Wordle – one of my personal favourite “cool and motivational tools”. Then we took turns to have control of desktop so everyone could add their own choice of cool tools. Thus we were able to build a collaborative “Cool Tools” wordle of some of our favourites.

We had time for a further “round” of sharing. Once again each briefly talking about a tool of our choice, with some Application Sharing and links shared in text chat.

Conclusion

This session was a great one to be part of! As usual with sessions where we share favourite tools there were ones new to me, so I have new tools to explore.

Our Next Session

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session, in which we take a look at the contrasting examples of Diigo and Symbaloo for online/social bookmarking in “I’m sure I saw that somewhere!”  Join us on Thursday December 1^st at 23:00 GMT/UTC the time for you will vary depending on your timezone (check yours here) Thursday afternoon/evening in the USA, late night Thursday in Europe, and Friday morning December 2^nd in Australia – in the usual Blackboard Collaborate virtual room

Introduction

This recorded, Fine Focus session presented by Jo Freitag (@jofrei) was fascinating and exciting. Jo coordinates the “Gifted Resources” information service website which includes “Sprite’s Site” where Dabrowski’s Dogs are regular visitors. She has intrigued us with mentions of Dabrowski’s Dogs in a number of sessions so it was particularly exciting to have a session devoted to them.

The Session

Jo started off by finding out where we were coming from on “Dabrowski’s Dogs”. She then gave as a great list of references so that we could find out more about the overexcitabilities for ourselves at a later stage.

Next we took a look at the dogs themselves as personifications of Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities. Jo gave us great character sketches of the dogs and also links to blog posts that explore the characterisitics.

Then it was our turn to do some work. Jo gave us slides on which to brainstorm the positives and negatives of the overexcitabilities in a classroom context and to suggest strategies for managing these.

The first of these slides is shown above. This activity was a great tool for thinking about the impacts of the overexcitabilities in the classroom context and for considering how they might be managed. As well as the whiteboard input there were also ideas shared in text chat. Jo also talked briefly about a teaching unit that can be used to help students better understand themselves.

Finally Jo asked us how we felt at this stage about Dabrowski’s Overexcitabilities which gave rise to an additional whiteboard activity for us to express whether we could see echoes of ourselves in the dogs.

Conclusion

This was a fantastic session – full of information and activities and with lots of interesting “homework” in the form of links to visit later. As always I learned much! It seems to me that a virtual classroom might have some advantages over a face-to-face situation for managing some of the negatives (particularly those characterisitics that prove distracting to others) posed by the overexcitabilities.

Next Webinar

Our next session will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday November 24^that 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday November 25^th at 7am West Aus, mid morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual Elluminate room. This is one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic.

Introduction

For this exciting  recorded unconference session Tracy Watanabe (@tracywatanabe), who is Technology Integration Specialist at Apache Junction USD in Arizona, was our guest facilitator. Tracy is a regular attendee at both Serendipity and Fine Focus sessions and did a great job in keeping the session flowing smoothly and picking up on questions in textchat. A number of Tracy’s colleagues participated actively in the session and for most I believe it was their first webinar!

The Session

The session followed the usual Serendipity format with a whiteboard for topic ideas from participants and then a poll to choose the topic for discussion. The clear winner this week was project based learning (PBL)

This session had a great blend of textchat, audio and whiteboard contributions beginning with a whiteboard and discussion about ideas for projects that could form the basis of project based learning in difference disciplines. Participants shared examples of how they are using PBL with their students.

We moved on to discuss assessment of PBL

Again this generated lots of ideas, some captured on the whiteboard, others through textchat and audio. Comments from others brought home to me how lucky I am to be in the outcomes based Vocational Education sector here in Australia. Standardised testing is not something we have to do! Our students have to meet standards but the emphasis is on being able to demonstrate that they can do something and that they have the necessary knowledge to do this in a work context. Having said that, we are still bound by “curriculum” and time constraints into teaching/training to meet outcomes rather than to develop our learners.

Conclusion

This was such fun! I love it when someone else is the primary facilitator because it gives me a little time to participate in the session so I can add my “two penn’orth” (“two cents worth”). This was a great ideas sharing session where the diversity of participant experience ranging all the way from primary to adult education, of sector (school, non-formal and vocational education) and jurisdiction (Australia and USA) gave rise to a variety of project ideas and assessment strategies.

Our Next Session

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session, in which Jo Freitag (@jofrei) will tell us about “Dabrowski’s Dogs”  Join us on Thursday November 17^th at 23:00 GMT/UTC the time for you will vary depending on your timezone (check yours here) Thursday afternoon/evening in the USA, late night Thursday in Europe, and Friday morning November 18^th in Australia – in the usual virtual room

Introduction

This Fine Focus session, recording here, was similar to one I did recently with colleagues. I am currently introducing some Web2.0 tools to some of my colleagues and Facebook is one of these.

The Session

The session was fun! I used video and application share,I  had intended a web tour also but BbC wasn’t co-operating so the web-tour became another applicaion share. We started with some general discussion about Facebook and moved on to some of the uses and pros and cons of using with students – including the fact that it is a “place” where many students already “hang out”.

Next we took a look at some of the practicalities of using Facebook in education and the issues around privacy and confidentiality. This included a look at the practicalities of having a second account and the advantages of groups over fan pages. We finished with a quick look at the need for management by group owners to ensure that behaviour remains acceptable.

Conclusion

I felt that I talked too much in this session – something I often feel to be the case when I am the “presenter” as well as the facilitator.  However text chat was active and there was great input on whiteboards so the session seemed to be effective. Also as usual I tried to include too much! So the session was a bit rushed towards the end.

Next Webinar

Our next session facilitated by Tracy Watanabe (@tracywatanabe) one of our regular participants will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday November 10^that 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday November 11^th at 7am West Aus, mid morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual Elluminate room. This is one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic.