Serendipity webinar overview – Elluminate playtime

Introduction

In our recent recorded Serendipity webinar we “played” with Elluminate. This was the topic chosen after some discussion.

The Session

For this session everyone was given moderator rights.

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This always gives rise to very “interesting” times with whiteboards whizzing rapidly by as everyone experiemnts with all the extra tools they get as moderators. If rapid image movement unsettles you you might want to keep your eyes closed during some of the recording :). We took a quick skim through some of the main features that moderators use: whiteboard – loading content, moving slides, seeing who has used whiteboard tools to add content; saving whiteboards; polling – publishing the results to the whiteboard; application share – giving and taking control of desktops.

Conclusion

I always enjoy this type of session – they tend to stretch me because everyone is exploring and asking questions. So even with a small group I am sometimes trying to address three or four questions at the same time. However I always also have some concerns that these sessions don’t always work well for participants so I wouldparticularly welcome any comments about that. I have thought about using breakout rooms for these types of sessions and may well try that next time – if anyone has any other ideas about how to run “playtime” sessions in Elluminate without a degree of chaos I would love to hear them.

Next Session

FineFocusSmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. This week Ellena Bethea presents the second of our sessions on GoogleDocs  “Using Google Docs to Go Paperless, Collaborate in the Secondary Classroom”. In this interactive session Ellena will focus on using Google Spreadsheets, Google Drawings, and Google Forms to eliminate worksheets in the high school classroom, with an emphasis on high school science. Ellena is a fourth year high school chemistry teacher at a private school in Manhattan. Her focus is finding ways to use technology to enhance inquiry and learning in the classroom. Join us on Thursday Sept 23rd at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Sept 24th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

In the Future

If you are a regular visitor to our webinars you will know that we alternate “Fine Focus” sessions on specific topics with “Serendipity” the unconference sessions where we choose a topic by poll at the start of the session. Sometimes the very fact of being asked for “hot topics” or other ideas for discussion or learning tends to make our minds blank. This has prompted me to start a Serendipity Wallwisher for topic suggestions. Please visit the wall and add your ideas for Serendipity topics so that we have more choices to consider. Some of these ideas might also form the basis for future “Fine Focus” sessions.

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