Edublogs Serendipity webinar overview – 14/15th April

Introduction

In compensation for the last Serendipity, where I was a bit late starting the recording, this time I started it early so you have some of the initial conversation!

As always here is the recording link for the session – please let me know if you access the recording. We had a dead heat for choice of topics so as we often do in those circumstances we elected to look briefly at both. The topics were:

  • “How to drag the bulk of trainers (kicking and screaming?) into teaching in a way that our students now need?”
  • Using Xtranormal to make animations for scenarios

We started with the first of these allocating 25 minutes to each.

The Session

We started with the discussion question posted on the whiteboard. then we spent a few minutes brainstorming ideas that we might use to help get colleagues onboard with e-strategies for teaching.

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We then moved on to discuss some of the individual suggestions with those responsible talking about their ideas and thus generating further discussion. The 25 minutes ran out all too soon!

Using Xtranormal was a complete change not only of topic but of exploration style! While several of us had “dabbled” in Xtranormal in the past, only one of the group had really used it. She was able to show us one of her first animations and also to tell us some of the pros and cons. We each visited and briefly explored the Xtranormal link. This of course generated more questions and discussion. Again we ran out of time far too quickly and it was time to draw the session to a close.

Conclusion

This was an excellent session with much sharing. The contrast between the two topics and the different ways in which we explored them highlights the truly serendipitous nature of these sessions. I have taken away an intention to explore Xtranormal further! I will try and do my “homework” this week and produce an animation – if I succeed I will tweet the link with #serendiped

Our Next Session

FineFocusSmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. This week’s session is “Twitter 201” So you are on Twitter – you Tweet, @, DM and RT – you are past Twitter 101 so what comes next?  Join us on Thursday April 21st 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

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.