Tag Archives: collaboration

Edublogs webinar overview – the Global Classroom project

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Introduction

In this session, recorded as always, we heard from Michael Graffin about the variety of projects that have formed part of the “Global Classroom Project” (#GlobalClassroom) this year.

The Session

Michael took us on an incredible journey. He started with some background, firstly explaining how the Global Classroom came about and its reach both geographically and in numbers. Then moving on to the aims and ethos of the community.

For me the most exciting part was the project stories – Michael shared the project stories and some of the highlights of the year. We were lucky in that Lin-Lin Tan from Taiwan, one of the teachers involved in several projects was able to join the session. She told us a little about how the Global Classroom projects have affected her and her students.

Michael moved on to consider some of the impacts of Global Classroom on teachers and some lessons learnt. Finally he turned to the future with thoughts for next year’s #GlobalClassroom.

Conclusion

This was a fantastic session! Michael gave us a brilliant overview of Global Classroom and the projects. Chat was very lively throughout with many ideas shared and also links to many of the projects (thanks to Anne Mirtschin for her help in dropping links into chat). If you are looking to be both inspired and awe inspired then this is a MUST catch recording!

Next Webinar

Our next session will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday July 19th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday July 21st at 7am West Aus, mid morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual BlackboardCollaborate 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 – “cool tools!”

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Introduction

We were a small group this week, however as usual the session was  recorded, so if you missed it you can catch the recording.

The Session

The session followed the usual Serendipity format with a whiteboard for topic ideas from participants and then a poll to choose the topic for discussion. The consensus was for us to merge two topics “Tech toys for motivation” and “Cool tools” and talk about and share some of our personal favourites.

A small group means that everyone has an opportunity to talk on the microphone and this is what we did! We started with a whiteboard on which we wrote some initial tools but soon moved the taking turns to talk about personal cool tools (mainly via audio but with some textchat particularly for sharing links)

When it came to my turn rather than just talk about a tool I Application Shared Wordle – one of my personal favourite “cool and motivational tools”. Then we took turns to have control of desktop so everyone could add their own choice of cool tools. Thus we were able to build a collaborative “Cool Tools” wordle of some of our favourites.

We had time for a further “round” of sharing. Once again each briefly talking about a tool of our choice, with some Application Sharing and links shared in text chat.

Conclusion

This session was a great one to be part of! As usual with sessions where we share favourite tools there were ones new to me, so I have new tools to explore.

Our Next Session

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session, in which we take a look at the contrasting examples of Diigo and Symbaloo for online/social bookmarking in “I’m sure I saw that somewhere!”  Join us on Thursday December 1st 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 December 2nd in Australia – in the usual Blackboard Collaborate virtual room

 

Edublogs webinar overview – e-learning jargon

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Introduction

This was a great session – Phil (@philhart) got us all thinking as we discussed our ideas and opinions about the jargon we all use in an e-learning context and how this jargon may impact on those new to the field.

The Session

The session was recorded as usual (please let me know if you access it) for those who were unable to attend.

Phil started us off by getting us to share on the whiteboard our understanding of “jargon”

JargonResize

Then we moved on to sharing some of our own experiences with “jargon” and looked at how we teach this for our oun subject areas.

Phil then asked if anyone had used a “Jargon Buster” and if so had they found it useful. One of the common problems with these is that they may often use “jargon” in defining “jargon” – very frustrating for the user! Phil has started a wiki experiment developing a dictionary of e-learning “jargon” where he is trying to use definitions written in plain language. We all had a go at trying to define a few given e-words in a simple easily understood way and also took a look at some of the “jargon” we ourselves have trouble with.

Phil moved on to look at the implications of “jargon” for those new to e-learning (both students and teachers) and thence to what we might do to try and help those new to the field. The wiki was started as an experiment but with collaboration has the potential to grow and could perhaps make a contribution to “unjargoning” the “jargon”. Phil invited all of us to join and collaborate whith him in building a “Dictionary of e-learning Jargon”  If you too would like to join this collaboration and contribute some definitions to the dictionary then ask Phil for an invitation. You can ask him by sending him your email either by DM on Twitter (@philhart) or by filling in the contact form on his blog

Conclusion

This session was fascinating, it certainly made me think again about jargon and how I use it and teach it. Like several of the definitions given in our look at some meanings I often use analogies that come from a (hopefully) more familiar context to my audience. I know I am sometimes guilty of using jargon without being sure that my audience understands this. I find this often happens when I am short of time or “characters” eg on Twitter where I often assume incorrectly that Tweeters will automatically be very “techie” people.

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday June 9th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday June 10th 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 of the day. If you want to propose a topic in advance then visit the Serendipity Wallwisher and add your topic.

Overview Edublogs webinar – Face to Facebook!

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Introduction

In this Edublogs Fine Focus session (recording here) Jane Curry (@parrpakala on Twitter) introduced us to the way she is using Facebook to enhance and improve the learning experience for “English as a Second Language” learners. This was an exciting session not only because of the way that Jane is incorporating Facebook but because she also included some of her students in the session. Jane teaches English as a second language at Swinburne TAFE (public vocational education) in Melbourne,  Victoria, Australia. Jane’s students are migrants/refugees. Migrants to Australia have an entitlement to some  English language classes when they arrive. The programme usually used is the Certificates in Spoken and Written English (CSWE). This is multi level and outcomes based, students need to demonstrate that they can read, speak and write to the relevant level. So any opportunity to practise reading, writing or other forms of communication in different ways is very welcome.

The Session
Jane started the session by telling us a little about her students and their backgrounds. Facebook is a relatively recent introduction, the students also participate in a class blog. Jane talked about her reasons for using Facebook and also some of the advantages in that it allowed easy communication between the students, volunteer mentors and lecturers. It was also easy for two organisations, CMY and Foundation House that provide support for the students, to join in through Facebook. Jane shared her desktop to show us the group’s Facebook page …

Facebook

and also demonstrated how she uses live chat with her students. There were a variety of questions and ideas raised in text chat around the practicalities of using Facebook particularly with second language learners and privacy issues relating to its use. Jane responded to these during the session. The highlight was when two of Jane’s students bravely joined her at the microphone and answered some questions from us about: where they were from; what they though about using Facebook; and whether they had Facebook friends elsewhere.

Conclusion

This session was very exciting as it is the first time we have had students taking part in this way and I think that both Jane and her students were very brave to be prepared to do this. Jane did a great job, she has not had the opportunity to join many sessions as her class coincides with webinar times and this was her very first session as a moderator. As always this overview gives only a taste of the session. For the full “flavour” catch the recording.

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 Nov 11th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (6pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Nov 12th at 1am CEST, 7am West Aus, 10am 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

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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 – Your Web2.0 tools + PLN thoughts

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Introduction

This was an exciting Edublogs “Serendipity” where we found out a little about some of the Web2.0 tools used by others. You can find the session recording here – my apologies I was slightly late starting the recording. We started as usual by putting some topic ideas on the whiteboard. Although this was done a little differently as we now have the Serendipity Wallwisher for topic ideas as well as those “on the day”. After some suggestions from those present I also shared the wall through application share for us to add topics from there.

The Session

The poll on topics gave us a tie between Which Web 2.0 Tools Do You Use and “What is a PLN”. The group decided to look briefly at both as they seemed linked to some extent.

We started by using the whiteboard to list the tools we use individually whether personally or professionally.

Web2ToolsWeUse

We then highlighted those that appeared only once and invited the users of those tools to share the purpose of the tool and how they use it. In this way we were able to get an overview of several tools new to most of us. I certainly took away several that I will be exploring in much nore detail in the near future. Looking at tools in this way also led us into some discussion on our second topic about the nature of PLNs where we very briefly shared some thoughts about “What is a PLN”. We didn’t really have time to do this topic justice.

Conclusion

This was a great session – the best thing about our Serendipity sessions is the spontanous sharing and learning that happens.

Next Session

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. Following on from the Serendipity session above we are going to ask YOU about YOUR PLN in “Your PLN – what’s in it for all of us!” We ask you to share: how it works, why it works, what tools you use, and your ideas about what makes a great PLN. Join us on Thursday Aug 26th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday July 27th 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 – Connections made!

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Introduction

As with a session a few weeks ago I was laid low by a migraine and find myself writing an overview for a session I didn’t attend – as I said at the time recordings are a wonderful thing! My overview is written from listening to the recording but really this is one you need to hear for yourself.

The Session

The two suggested topics of: 21st Century Skills in the elementary classroom; and getting started with blogging in an education context seemed to merge quite easily into one.  This was a very relaxed conversation in a small group discussing ideas and where each person is currently with their students. It developed into planning the basis of a future classroom collaboration between participants.

Conclusion

This was a fantastic example of Serendipity in action! A group of people looking for similar outcomes and actually starting to develop their classroom collaboration in the session.

Next Week

TechieSmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session a “Techie How To” – “Layering with GIMP!” an interactive session in which we invite you to explore using layers with the GIMP. This is for those who want a rather more sophisticated (but still free) image editor than Photofiltre (our topic a couple of weeks ago) .

Join us on Thursday July 15th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday July 16th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

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Serendipitous Collaboration

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Our Edublogs Serendipity sessions are unconference sessions. This means we don’t have a pre-planned topic but ask you to come along with topics you want to discuss and/or learn about. We put these on the whiteboard and the topic is chosen by a poll. This week was a very lively session (recording here) with worldwide participation from a great bunch of people. We started with a small number but people came in throughout the session so that we had about 17 participants.

Our poll at the start was a choice between three options:

  • best Skyping practices
  • managing student learning on very few resources
  • how to collaborate with other schools around the world

The hands down winner was collaboration!

Just to clarify for everyone – although we often use the term school throughout sessions we have regular participants from vocational, further and higher education and also librarians from these sectors as well as from schools. Using the term “school” is a convenience and refers to education in general.

Several people were already involved in collaboration with other schools around the world. These shared some of the strategies they use generating considerable discussion and ideas in text chat as well as through audio and on the whiteboard. One of our participants (Shelly, well known to many of us through Twitter (@ShellTerrell) and her blog) then described a particular complex collaboration (involving large numbers at each end of the conversation) that she is planning and asked for ideas. These came thick and fast ranging from single applications to blends of several and leading us once again to consideration of limited  bandwidth and its impacts  and implications. The session was itself a wonderful illustration/example of a global collaboration with all of us focussing on the practical strategies of managing a specific event.

By this point time was running out so feedback and future ideas were the order of the day – everyone then had a great time putting avatars, clipart and comments on the final whiteboard.

Final wbd 11 12 09

We finished up with a reminder that next week’s session (Thursday 17th or Friday 18th December depending on your timezone) is an End of Year party. We invite you to bring delicious virtual food or drink to share, and challenge you to develop and bring an Elluminate party game for us all to play. For ideas look out for my post about this in the next couple of days!