E-blends – Regional/Remote Students Webinar

This recorded session was for “eT@lking” organised by Ann Mirtschin and Carole McCulloch in the “Australia Series”   – itself a relatively recent LearnCentral opportunity intended to facilitate the provision of more Webinars at “Australia friendly” times. The reference to Australia in the title refers only to the timing and perspectives from around the globe are definitely most welcome!

Ann has given a great overview of the session in her discussion posting on LearnCentral NB you do have to be a logged in member of LearnCentral to access this, and now in her blog also.

For me this session was very different from my regular Edublogs webinars. This was for a couple of reasons:

  1. I wasn’t in the “hot seat”, yes I was the presenter and yes I was a moderator but the lead moderator/session manager role was brilliantly undertaken by Ann and Carole;
  2. For the first time in many months I was talking explicitly to my peers about what I am doing with my own students in the here and now.

I so enjoyed this session! Sharing what I am trying to do and seeking feedback from other educators a number of whom have experience with similar target groups either in Certificates in General Education or other contexts was a great “industry contact” experience.

I started with a bit of context setting as I find that even some Western Australians the majority of whom live in the Perth Metro area find the rural situation hard to understand.  Then I asked for thoughts about what challenges had to be managed. This produced a lot of ideas on the whiteboard that made a neat Wordle …

Challenges… that closely matched what I have found to be the issues I encountered in trying to get the e-blend approach off the ground.

ChallengesMyPerspective

We then moved on for a quick look at some of the strategies I had used to try and overcome the issues. This included sharing some pages from the Learning Management System. I had hoped to give someone else control of my desktop and ask them to move through some pages but time was too short to do this. I ended by asking if the group thought my strategies went some way towards addressing the challenges and asking for suggestions and ideas about what else I might do.

I was very conscious that as usual I had planned an awful lot to fit into the time so I tried to keep the session moving along at a good pace while still giving opportunities for interaction. The session felt lively and interactive to me and included a lot of text chat interaction and questions. However as always when presenting I think I am too close to my material to be truly objective. I certainly think I went a little too fast when using Application Share and hope that everyone was able to see the screens that I shared. Final comments from the participants …

FinalComments… were very positive and indicated that people found what I was doing interesting, relevant to my learners  and useful.

TechieSmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Techie How To!” session “Feed Learning with a Hot Potato!”  In this session we will take a look at and have a “play” with Hot Potatoes. Despite a comment from someone on Twitter recently that it is “very tired and outdated” I still use Hot Potatoes to make interactives for my students. It is easy to use; works well for many of the activities needed to develop reading and writing skills and; I can upload the products easily into the Learning Management System.

Join us on Thursday April 8th at 23:00 GMT (7pm USA EDT) or Friday April 9th at 7am West Aus, 9am NSW, 1am CEST depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room.

.

3 thoughts on “E-blends – Regional/Remote Students Webinar

  1. Pingback: Tweets that mention Finally! Post with recording link about my webinar for Aus Series on E-blends - Regional/Remote Students -- Topsy.com

  2. Hi Jo and thank you so much for your wonderful presentation. It was just wonderful to moderate your session as you are so experienced you dont even need a moderator and Carole and I could sit back, relax and listen you what you shared. I also admire the work that you do and if an online learning environment works for your students, it must have the capability to work for all and any students. Your generousity in sharing experiences was much appreciated and I am glad that you enjoyed that. You had a lot of keen, avid learners in your audience.
    Thanks also for this interesting post. I love the way that you use wordle to summarise the essential key points. Have you tried worditout yet? I have been to look at that one.
    I did not realise that you need to be a member of Learncentral to be able to listen to the recordings, as I have shared that link with my friends on the Guide to Innovation (http://guidetoinnovation.ning.com) but next time had better warn them that they need to be members.
    It was great that you did prepare too many slides as I hope that you will return again and finish them with us. Thanks again.
    Also I am really interested to see your session on hot potatoes coming up. Although I am at ACEC I hope that I might be able to sneak into to your session but if I cant I shall listen to the previous session you share with me and this one.

    • Thank you so much Anne for your response and your lovely comments about the session. I had a great time! It is still early days yet in working online with my off-campus students but do so hope that I can keep building on this and get the online environment to work well for them.

      Wordle is one of my favourite toys, along with ToonDoo I often use one or other in posts because I think I have a tendency to write too much and both of these are great for encapsulating things in a visual form. I haven’t tried worditout yet but have seen it mentioned a few times on Twitter

      I think you have to belong to LearnCentral to access the discussion topic where you first wrote your overview of the session and posted the recording link. At least I couldn’t access it when I was not logged in to LC. I think if you have just sent the link or posted it in your blog it should be OK.

      Thank you again

      Jo

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *