Catching up! Recent Edublogs webinars

Introduction

I am still well behind in posting webinar overviews So this week is a a catchup with topics and recording links for several recent webinars

Some iPad apps

This recorded session was a FineFocus session in which I used “AirServer” and BbC App Share to share, very briefly, some of the iPad apps I have on my iPad. This prompted great discussion, and sharing of apps they use, by other participants.

Serendipity

A very lively session – recorded as always in which our focus was on multiliteracies. We also touched briefly on: innumeracy in primary school teachers, vulnerabilities to hacking in some hosted blogging platforms and the best time of year to hold online conferences.

Small, small things!

A FineFocus session in which we took a look at some of the small tools and tricks that make our lives easier. This was a great recorded session with some terrific tools and tricks shared. We all have little things that we use to help us streamline our busy lives and it is always useful to find out what others use.

Another Serendipity!

This was another recorded session in which the consensus was to look briefly at all of the suggested topics which were:

  • how do you use PLN in your classroom
  • coding in the classroom
  • how to get busy people to join voluntary PD sessions

Conclusion

My apologies for not the very short topic descriptions! I hope to return to more complete overviews from the FineFocus mentioned below which was yesterday, and was “If it’s on the Internet it must be true!” with Phil Hart. I hope to publish the overview & recording link for that one tomorrow.

Our Next Webinar

Our next webinar will be an Edublogs “FineFocus” session on Thursday June 27th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday June 28th at 7am West Aus, later in the  morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual BlackboardCollaborate room.

Edublogs webinar overviews – Several recent webinars

Introduction

Over the last few weeks I have fallen very behind with overviews so this week is a double overview for four recent webinars. There will be less detail than usual about each webinar because I feel it is important to share the links which I have not yet done rather than write detailed overviews.

Exploring Sticky note walls

This recorded session was a FineFocus session in which we explored some of the online “sticky note” walls available. We started as we so often do with “where are you coming from” on the topic questions. These elicited that all but one of us had used sticky wall notes at some time.

We finished up with an opportunity to share our own preferences – several links had been shared earlier via text, a look at our “take-aways” from the session and some quick feedback!

Serendipity

A really interesting session – recorded as always in which we discussed several topics, this is something we do more often in Serendipity at the moment as we are often a small group. Topics were:

  • Sharing links – in which we shared links that had interested us recently
  • Hacking – concerns about our devices and information being accessed unbeknownst to us. This topic gave rise to the following week’s FineFocus – see below.
  • “Technology terrorising teachers – does it? what can we do about it?

As always time went too fast and it was the end of the session!

Keeping the “Black Hats” at bay

This was a terrific recorded session by @philhart (when he isn’t teaching Phil is a freelance computer consultant) who gave us a very thought provoking insight into the risks we take every time we connect to the Internet, and into some of the strategies for reducing these risks.

Phil dis a great job of demystifying some of the jargon. He also made the point strongly that there is no complete answer – all we can do is be vigilant. I certainly came out of the session with much greater knowledge and awareness than I had when I went in! I would suggest catching the recording to anyone who has any concerns about online security – and really this should be everyone!

Another Serendipity!

This was another enjoyable recorded session in which we took a look at several topics:

  • linking/embedding webinars in posts
  • an update on “willing your digital empire”
  • how would you cope with NO paper available for class

Interesting topics – there will be a FineFocus coming up on “Willing your digital empire”, and the “no paper” question always raises interesting ideas. Of course we always assume that “no paper” means that we do have technology. 🙂

Conclusion

These were great sessions and my apologies for not doing them justice in the overviews!

Our Next Webinar

Our next webinar will be an Edublogs “FineFocus” session on Thursday May 30th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday June 1st at 7am West Aus, later in the  morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual BlackboardCollaborate room.

Edublogs Serendipity webinar overview – reading to dogs, why great apps close, mismatched expectations

Introduction

Again a Serendipity session where we didn’t vote on a topic! When we are only  very small group as has been the case often lately it works well for us to briefly visit several topics. This week we looked a “reading to dogs”, “why great programs/apps close” and 2stC expectations in a digital age. As always we recorded the session.

(For the link for live webinars and info about the times and topics scroll to the bottom of this post)

The session

This was an interesting session starting wih a look at “reading to dogs” a fascinating topic shared by @jofrei about “Reading Assistance Dogs” who help reluctant readers with reading aloud by being non-judgemental listeners. Jo shared a number of links, and this caused us to widen our thoughts into other animals as “assistants”

We then moved on to consider some possible reasons why what we feel are great programs/apps disappear or are changed beyond recognition by being taken over.

An offshoot from this included thoughts on the proliferation of new apps many of which seem to be very similar in purpose and which often don’t last long. My own leanings are towards using Open Source apps maintained by the community. This is because it appears to me that anything small and commercial that is good is immeditely a target for takeover by one of the giants in the field. It is then either shut down because it was a competitor or changed beyond recognition in the name of re-badging. These closures of good apps also raise issues about loss of personal data that has been uploaded and/or the complexities of removing it and transferring to a new platform. This provides a strong argument for having everything backed up in the “down here” and not just up in the cloud.

Our final very briefly visited topic was about the continuing existence of 20th Century expectations/methodologies being applied to assessment of learners who are learning using digital technology. This raised questions about: the time spent teaching the students how to use the tech tools instead of working with content; and the fact that students no longer need to learn and regurgitate content but must instead be able to evaluate information that they source from the Internet and make informed judgements on its reliability. This is definitely a topic for a full Finefocus session in the future!

Conclusion

As always a fascinating session – we almost forgot to stop at the finish time! These flying visits to several topics in a session are fun, and they work well with a small group.

Our Next Session

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. In this session Phil Hart (@philhart) will take us on an introductory look at e-publishing in “E-publish or be e-damned”.  Join us on Thursday August 23rd 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 August 24th in Australia – in the usual Blackboard Collaborate virtual room.

Edublogs webinar overview – “Is this video worth watching virtually?”

Introduction

Apologies all for the delay in publishing this overview – a combination of #RSCON3 at the weekend and preparing professional development sessions for colleagues has kept me from finishing this post. This was an incredibly useful session at least for me! I am frequently irritated by videos that take forever to load when I click on them and as a consequence I rarely view embedded videos. Although the purpose of this session was to explain how to re-size videos appropriately so that they could be used practically in a virtual classroom eg Elluminate context I think that there are much wider applications for anyone uploading video for others to view. Phil did a brilliant job particularly as he was also coping with the idiosyncracies of the Elluminate replacement – Blackboard collaborate. Checkout the recording for the full session.

The Session

Throughout the session Phil showed us, and discussed, a number of examples of different sized files and talked about the impact on resolution. One of the issues we face with video is the need for trade-offs between size on the screen and file size which affects download time.

Next there was quick look at some of the file formats in use with reference to the need to choose one of the very common ones to ensure that the majority of viewers will have an appropriate player. We were introduced to Phil’s favourite video player/converter – the VLC Media Player – a free download.

The formal part of session ended with a demonstration of the conversion process and a look at the need to experiement a little to find out what works best. However there was some continuing discussion and experimentation with the new Blackboard Collaborate interface – including a collection of images posted on the whiteboard.

Conclusion

I know I will refer back to the content of this session because one of my objectives for the near future is to explore and use video more often. Because of issues with bandwidth and download costs for my students it has always been something I have tended to avoid apart from occasional links to pre-existing videos. However if I can produce videos that are not too demanding on infrastructure I will use them more because they can add an extra dimension for my students.

Next Webinar

Our next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday August 4th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday August 5th 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

Edublogs Serendipity webinar overview – Tools we use most & why!

Introduction

This session was fun with lots of tools shared and discussed. Also I started the recording at the proper time this week, there was a lot of audio discussion as well as text chat and the recording is well worth catching if you missed the session.

The Session

Our chosen topic was “What tech tools do you use the most and why?” We put the title on an empty whiteboard and then each added the tools we use most.

ToolsWordleResizeThis gave us a great selection to talk about! We only managed to discuss a small number in the time available, and even then we scarcely touched on the “why” of using particular tools. Because we all found this session both useful and interesting and felt that there was so much more we could have discussed we are going to try something a little bit different in the upcoming Fine Focus session, by continuing the theme of tools we use most and inviting YOU to tell the group about your most used tools.

Show and Tell Invite resizeWe already have one volunteer who DM’d me after the session. Please join us and add your voice to the session. Let me know if you would like to “Show and Tell” and what tool you plan to talk about (so we can avoid doubling up).  My Twitter ID is @JoHart or you can use the Contact Form on my “About Me” page

Conclusion

This was a great session and was definitely one of those where we just didn’t have enough time to talk about everything. I left resolved to investigate several tools that were new to me – although the available time for that is extremely limited at the moment!

Our Next Session

FineFocusSmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. This week in “Show and Tell” We invite volunteers to do a 10 minute “Show and Tell” about one of the tools they teach their students about. Check out the Invitation above – let me know if you would like to “Show and Tell” If you haven’t used Elluminate before we can help with anything you would like to do.  Join us on Thursday June 16 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 in Australia – in the usual Elluminate room

Edublogs webinar overview – Graphic Organisers

Preface

If you access the link to the recording it would be great if you would just leave a short comment on this post to let me know. I would really like to know if it is useful to people when I post the overviews & recording links

Introduction

One of those rare sessions where I was not actually there! I was laid low by a migraine and was unable to join this exciting recorded session by Shelly Terrell. So as I have said before “recordings are a wonderful thing” because even though I wasn’t there I am still able to write an overview. Phil did a great job on the introductions etc and Shelly was, as always, fabulous! I am so sorry that I missed the live session – I was really looking forward to it and although recordings are great the lack of ability to participate is very frustrating.

The Session

Shelly began with some introductory information and talked about the most simple forms of graphic organiser. She used a simple graphic organiser (GO) format to ask for input from participants on what they already knew about them and then what they would like to know/find out.The “what we already know” made a great Wordle!

WhatWeKnowGOWordleResize

The next part of the session included a variety of ideas on using GO with students – Shelly showed us some great images of mind maps/GO from her students. Shelly then moved on to look at some online GOs especially for mobile use, again sharing brilliant ideas on using these with students particularly for collaborative activities.

Next Shelly used Application Share to share a wiki with links for a wide variety of graphic organisers/mindmapping. This includes paper-based, downloadable, online, rubrics and many extra ideas and resources. Shelly then showed us some of the ones she has used giving a great “flavour” of what is available!

Finally it was a return to the original graphic organiser to complete the “what as been learnt” and “how to find out more” sections.

Conclusion

As is always the case with Shelly’s sessions this was terrific! From watching the recording I have learned much more about GOs and how they may be used. The links provided via the wiki are invaluable and once again I have a huge list of things to check out from one of these sessions.

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday Feb 3rd at 23:00 GMT/UTC (6pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Feb 4th at 1am CEST, 7am West Aus, 10am NSW, depending on your timezone – 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 of the day. If you want to propose a topic in advance then visit the Serendipity Wallwisher and add your topic.

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.

Webinar Overview – Going Live & Paperless with GoogleDocs

Introduction

This fantastic Edublogs Fine Focus session (recording here) was a follow up to a quick and impromtu look at GoogleDocs in a Serendipity session a few weeks ago when we were lucky enough to have Rachael Colley (@burntsugar) with us when GoogleDocs was the chosen topic. In that short time Rachael gave us a quick look at some of the GoogleDocs features and whetted our appetites for more! So this week she was back with us to give us a more extended look at how she goes live and paperless in using GoogleDocs with her students.

The Session

This was very interactive and great fun! Rachael set up a doc for us to play with – she gave us a link for a fill in Google form so that we could submit our emails to enable her to give us access to the doc. This gave us all an opportunity to add our own comments to the sample doc – Rachael has now made this doc public for us and locked the editing so you can see what we wrote! We were also writing in the live chat and comments on the doc, so with the Elluminate chat as well it felt as if we had four backchannels all going at once. As usual the Elluminate chat window was scrolling fast with comments, questions, tips and ideas.  Throughout this Rachael also application shared through Elluminate – very useful for anyone who had not been able to access the doc for some reason – and also great for showing us where to find features such as the live chat.

Composite resizedAgain through application share, Rachael showed us examples of how she has all her course resources in GoogleDocs and uses a blend of the available tools to give her students different levels of access depending on the purpose of the resource.

Conclusion

This was a terrific session with so much going on that the time flew by even faster than usual in these webinars. I learnt so much and will definitely be using Googledocs with my distance students. I try to avoid anything with my students that is locked into a particular word processor as they don’t all have up to date word processing on their computers and I have been struggling to find a good practical solution (other than a word processed doc with spaces) to filling in questionnaires that enables them to keep a copy and also to submit the doc to me. Now thanks to Rachael I think I have the answer! It is well worth catching the recording as there is so much to see.

Next Week

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session, 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 of the day. If you want to propose a topic in advance then visit the Serendipity Wallwisher and add your topic. Then join us on Thursday Sept 16th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Sept 17th 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.

Webinar Overview – Using Layers in GIMP

Introduction

Our recent Edublogs webinar recording here was a “Techie How To” in which Phil Hart (@philhart) introduced, and gave us an opportunity to explore,  some of the tools that he uses for editing layers in the GIMP image editing application to produce a variety of effects.

The Session

As is often the case with “Techie How To” sessions (because they are aimed at particular interests) this was a small group. There are advantages with small groups for this type of session as they provide much greater opportunities for interaction and participation.

After a brief introduction Phil set the scene for the tools he was going to look at and started Application Sharing to show the example image with associated layers to be used in the session.

AppShareGIMP

Because the group was small Phil was able to provide plenty of opportunities for “playing” with the tools. He did this by giving control of his mouse to participants so that they could try out the effects for themselves on different layers in his image. There are (as I have said before) some limitations to this – the inevitable lag in response when the mouse is being controlled remotely being the main one. My personal feeling (based largely on the high level of positive comments from participants in previous sessions) is that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed the session because although I have used GIMP a little I have never really got to grips with layers in any image editor. Something that I took away from the session was a better awareness of how useful the facility to use layers could be for me. I know I will still use a simpler editor for the majority of my editing but I will certainly head for GIMP when I want to do something more complex.

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session so bring along your hot topics and burning issues (what makes you spit with anger or thump a tub with passion) and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes.

Join us on Thursday July 22 nd at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday July 23rd at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Edublogs/Elluminate Community Partnership room

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Webinar Overview – Introducing Scratch

Intro

Check out the recording for this  “Techie How To” session by guest presenter Carl Bogardus (on Twitter as @weemooseus) who showed us how he uses Scratch with students to develop a variety of visual and interactive projects and how this can help students with maths and logic as well as developing basic programming skills.

The session

Carl did an excellent job against all the odds – technical issues with audio and uploading slides meant that he presented the session “off the top of his head”. We started with a look at the Scratch

Scratch

homepage and Carl told us a little about how the site works. He then “played” a project developed by one of his former students to show us the sorts of things that can be done. Next Carl showed us how simply the program blocks can be put together, modified and then instantly tested.  As an illustration of how he uses Scratch to develop maths and logic skills Carl built a very small program to move a sprite by inviting suggestions from the group about how to achieve particular effects and then implementing these so that we could see if we were right! The session finished with questions.

Conclusion

Many thanks to Carl for providing a great introduction to an application that could, in my opinion, be useful for developing engaging learning resources as well as for students themselves to use in developing their own skills

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session so bring along your hot topics and burning issues (what makes you spit with anger or thump a tub with passion) and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes.

Join us on Thursday June 24th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday June 25th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

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Webinar Overview – Teaching With Moodle

This week’s Edublogs Webinar (recording here ) presented by Tomaz Lasic was a terrifically informative session that opened my (and I think many others’) eyes to the myriad ways of using Moodle in teaching.

The Webinar

This was a well attended session with our usual global mix from Australia, the USA, Canada, South America and Europe. There was also a variety of Moodle experience ranging from none to very experienced, with almost half of us falling into the “novice” group.

Tomaz began with a look at the principles underlying Moodle …

PrinciplesOfMoodle… and two questions to ponder during the session.

He then moved on to take us through the processes involved in building a course. This part of the session was packed with information! Tomaz used examples throughout from a course developed in his recent teaching role, showing us how the learners had become part of the development process and thus shared ownership of the course. A superb teaching strategy and fascinating to see how it can be implemented with Moodle – a huge contrast with the way many people use Learning Management systems (LMS) of any type ie as a repository for documents. To my relief (as a Moodle novice) most of the questions arising in text chat were ably fielded by the more experienced Moodle users in the audience. This meant that Tomaz was able to maintain the flow and his train of thought giving us a fascinating insight into the thoughts behind the development of the course. As a couple of people said at the end it would have been nice to see the options in action, but there would have been the inevitable trade-off in terms of covering less ground. If Tomaz had done this the focus would necessarily have been on a far smaller part of what is available and we would not have had such a clear picture of the many options available in Moodle.

To take us full circle at the end of the session Tomaz returned to the underlying principles of Moodle and the questions he posed at the beginning. He invited whiteboard comments on several aspects of using Moodle including how best to approach teaching with Moodle.

BestApproachFinally there was some excellent and extremely positive feedback. This was a great session all round with much food for thought and exciting strategies shared.

Next week

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session so bring along your hot topics and burning issues (what makes you spit with anger or thump a tub with passion) and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes.

Join us on Thursday April 1st at 23:00 GMT/UTC  (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday April 2nd at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 10am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

Also next week I am also doing a webinar on Wednesday March31st at 09:00 GMT/UTC (5am USA EST, 10am BST, 11am CEST, 5pm West Aus, 8pm NSW) depending on your timezone. This is  “E-blends and Regional/Remote Students”  in the LearnCentral public webinar room

This will be an interactive session aimed at exploring some of the challenges (and some possible solutions) of using e-learning blends for flexible delivery to a highly diverse and geographically scattered student group across four AQF levels of literacy, numeracy and study skills.

  • Context – where is this happening?
  • Who are the students?
  • Blending the learning – how and why
  • Some of the challenges.
  • Meeting the challenges.
  • Where to go next?
  • Feedback

Although this is under the banner of eT@lking in the Australia Series it is likely to be of interest to anyone working with distance learners wherever they are in the world.