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.

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.

FeralEllumToonResize

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.

Yammering Away!

Introduction

I have recently (in the last two weeks) initiated a Yammer network in my workplace. A few weeks ago in one of our Serendipity unconference webinars Yammer came up as one of the Web2.0 tools that someone was using in their organisation. As a committed Twitter user who has gained a huge amount both professionally and personally from my Twitter stream and how it fits into my PLN I thought that Yammer might be a good tool for my organisation. We are distributed over several campuses, people are often off campus for a variety of reasons and “corporate knowledge” is widely distributed and fragmented. A network such as Yammer provides opportunities to seek immediate answers to those quick questions we ask colleagues many times a day and to share ideas, information, knowledge and links about all aspects of our work.

What I did

To start with I initiated the network by signing up and then inviting four colleagues to join. Since then I have invited another three, and am about to invite a further three. My hope is that this will grow organically – I am totally convinced that trying to force adoption of this type of innovative (for many organisations including mine) approach to networking and sharing is counter-productive. Already several of my colleagues have invited others and at the moment we have 14 members and a further 13 who have been invited but not yet joined.

Only two of my colleagues are (to my knowledge) at the moment on Twitter, they are both new to it – and I am sure they won’t mind me saying that they are a bit apprehensive about networking in this way. When I started using Twitter I felt much the same way and it took me a while to “get into it”. However as none of my colleagues have used this type of networking strategy before I find myself “yammering” various suggestions and thoughts that might help people experiment, learn and ultimately enjoy this form of networking. So it seemd to me that it might be useful to post about these and then I can just use the link rather than filling the Yammer stream with all those suggestions on a frequent basis, so here are some of my ideas. These come largely out of my own experience with Twitter but with some modifications because in some ways an organisational Yammer network is very different from Twitter.

Tips for getting the most out of Yammer

StartingGetDesktop1. Get the desktop app – this is a narrow window with tabs that you can leave on your screen all day and it updates pretty much in real time. It doesn’t matter if you minimise it or bury it under other windows you can take the occasional look to see if anything of interest to you has appeared or if anyone has asked a question that you might be able to help with. YOU DON’T HAVE TO LOOK AT IT! Ignore it, hide it, close it – the choice is yours. At least it’s there if YOU want to ask a question!

Follow2. Follow people – otherwise you will miss their yams unless you watch the “Company Feed” instead of your own “My Feed”. If someone follows you you don’t have to follow them back but hey why wouldn’t you? We all need each other’s knowledge and support.

YammerDesktop13. Participate – join the convo (conversation); start a convo yourself; share a link; share an idea; answer a question; ask a question. Participators usually seem to get more out of these kinds of networks than lurkers (those who just observe and take useful things from the network without contributing).

4. KEEP IT SHORT! no more than 150-200 characters is best, OK we will all go over that occasionally but don’t let it become a habitl The global network Twitter limits to 140 characters – teaches us to be concise J.

5. Remember the social dimension – it oils the wheels of the professional interactions! It’s not a hanging offence to say social things – we all say social things in face-to-face situations, online networks are no different.

Reply16. If you like something then click “like” and then “reply” to tell the person who posted – we all appreciate being appreciated.

7. You can aim a message at a particular person use @ in front of user name (message is public) or use the user name without @ and the message is private

8. Fill in some of your profile info – not necessarily all of it but preferably include an avatar (pic or image to represent you) it doesn’t have to be a photo, any image that feels right to you is fine as long as it doesn’t offend others.

9. If you share a special interest with some colleagues make/join a group. Your messages can be public or private

10. If you want to give Yammer your best shot – remember anything new is hard at first. Give yourself a goal eg skim the stream at least a couple of times a day and post something at least once each day.

Invite11. Invite someone else – send an invite to a colleague & learn about Yammer together.

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Conclusion

For any Manager or Administrator out there who thinks that this is a time wasting toy and not appropriate for work – just a reminder that it can:

  • help to collect and disseminate the sort of corporate knowledge that organisations have spent much time and money trying to preserve and share for many years not least through Communities of Practice
  • save time spent trying to find the person with the answer to a particular question
  • make useful links more easily accessible to more people
  • increase collegiality

Yammer is what you want it to be and what you make it for YOU!

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 – two topics

Introduction

In our recent recorded Serendipity webinar we talked about two topics: the “blocking” issue and how we as teachers might cope with it; and a look at 21st Century learning skills – how and whether these should be integrated into curriculum standards.

The Session

This session was active through text and audio but less so on the whiteboard particularly with our first topic of “blocking”. This is a subject that always generates considerable discussion as people relate their experiences and try to find solutions. We also considered the possiblity that some of the isses arise because there is a shortage of technical support – particularly in smaller schools (as always we use school in its broadest sense). A possible solution to this – the “Mouse Squad” was mentioned. This is an innovative youth development programme where students provide IT support in their schools. Mention of this programme provided a neat transition into our second topic on 21st Century learning skills and their integration into curriculum. The focus here was on the need for curriculum writers to be teachers or to use input from teachers in developing curriculum. We also touched on the development of common core standards that is beginning to happen in countries of federated states like the USA and Australia, and also across countries as in the European Union.

Conclusion

This was an interesting session in that we had originally decided to look at three topics – there was a three way tie for choice. However there wasn’t really time for a third topic so we stopped at two. This worked well and as is often the case there are links between topics so we transitioned almost seamlessly between the two. I think it is a lesson learned that three topics in one session is too many!

Next Session

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. This week Rachael Colley presents “Going LIVE & PAPERLESS with GoogleDocs”. In this interactive session Rachael will demonstrate how she uses GoogleDocs with her students. Rachael is an ICT Trainer in the TAFE (Public Vocational Education and Training) sector in Melbourne, Australia. Join us on Thursday Sept 9th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Sept 10th 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.