Edublogs webinar overview – Pay for software you have to be joking!

Introduction

This was a great recorded session even though we were a very small group. Phil who is @philhart on Twitter did a terrific job and I really enjoyed being a “participant” and leaving most of the hard work to him!

The Session
After the usual preliminaries Phil started the session by checking that we had all recieved the file he had sent to us by file transfer. This is a listing of some free software that can be downloaded or accessed within the cloud. NB if you access the recording this file will also be automatically sent to you.

Phil asked us what software we already use or would want to use. He then moved on to ensuring that we all had a similar understanding of the terms “Open Source”, “Closed Source” and “Free Software”. From my own perspective it seems that the term “Free Software” is one that could provide much food for discussion in its own right! It is often used, in my opinion inappropriately, by suppliers for restricted and time limited trial versions.

We than moved on to sharing our experiences with some different free software Afterwards Phil raised the issue of  the pros and cons of free software and what we can do to mitigate the possiblew impacts of the “cons”.

ProConResize

As Phil was looking at both downloadable and cloud-based applications we also took a look at the concept of cloud-based computing and some of its possible disadvantages! The rest of the session was a discussion on some of the available software including links for sites which have a variety of free software available.

Conclusion

I learned lots from this session both from Phil and from the other participants! If you’re considering the possiblity of using free software or if you are already looking for something specific then its well worth catching the recording.

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday Jan 20th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (6pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Jan 21th 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 – GoogleDocs & High School Science

Introduction

This excellent Edublogs Fine Focus session (recording here) was our second full session on GoogleDocs in recent weeks. In this session Ellena Bethea (@21stcenturychem) gave us a look at how she uses GoogleDocs in her High School Chemistry context. This provided us with both a great follow on and a “compare and contrast” opportunity to the session two weeks ago when Rachael Colley (@burntsugar) introduced us to some of the features of GoogleDocs and showed us how these have enabled her to go paperless with her vocational IT students.

The Session

This session was a goldmine of ideas and information. Ellena set up a doc for us to experiment with later using a fill in Google form so that we could submit our emails to enable her to give us access to the doc.

The main thrust of the session was a look at how Ellena uses Google forms, spreadsheets, drawing and presentations with her students. Moreover she does this in a situation where computer access for students in the lab situation is minimal. Most student work done through GoogleDocs is done outside school with students collaborating on a variety of tasks sometimes synchronously and sometimes asynchronously.

Composite

Ellena used application share to great effect. She used a Google presentation for the session structure.  and then shared a wide variety of documents showing how she provides her students with great resources and opportunities  to work collaboratively on documents such as lab reports.

Conclusion

This was a fantastic session with just so much useful information. As with the session two weeks ago I learnt so much. I keep seeing more potential uses for GoogleDocs with my distance students.

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 30th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Oct 1st 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 – 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.

Serendipity Webinar Overview – GoogleDocs With Students

Introduction

As usual our Edublogs Serendipity session was recorded and is a great example of Serendipity in action. As often seems to be the case we had an initial tie for the topic but a second poll resolved this into the topic of “Using Google Docs”. Luckily for us we had Rachael Colley @burntsugar with us. Rachael uses Google Docs all the time with her students and is very knowledgable about them.

The Session

Rachael gave us a brilliant impromptu introduction to some of the features of Google Docs through a unique blend of Application Share on Elluminate and creating a Google document and sharing the link with us for us to “play”with a live document. Catch the recording to see how this worked.

GDocPic

This was very effective for several reasons including:

  • it didn’t matter if people joined the session after Rachael had shared the link or couldn’t access the document themeselves for any reason as they could still see anything typed in by the rest of us
  • it was possible for Rachael to indicate/demonstrate features/tools on the App Share so that we could see where they were and how they worked.

Rachael told us briefly about how she uses GoogleDocs with her students & how she and they experiment together.

Conclusion

In the very short time available Rachael whetted our appetites for more and I hope she will soon be coming along to do a whole Fine Focus session for us on Google Docs. Watch this space!

Next Week

TalkTime smallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session a “Talk Time”  session on “Twitter – rules or ground rules?” There are differing ideas on how Twitter is/should be used, what is “allowed” or “acceptable” or “unacceptable” behaviour. We would love your perspective on this for our discussion this week.

Join us on Thursday Aug 12th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday July 13th 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.