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Edublogs webinar overviews – Pt 2 De Bono action shoes for 2E students, a Serendipity & shared tools

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Introduction

Apologies once again for the delay in posting and the need to do a three in one post. Too many things happening in life and work at the moment and I can’t keep up! The first of the two sessions in this post ws the second half of a FineFocus session on De Bono’s action shoes and 2E students by @jofrei. The second was a Serendipity session – I am particularly grateful that this was recorded as I was unable to attend so the overview is based on the recording. The third session was an “off-the-cuff” session where several of us shared a tool/application we have used with students – Voicethread (@poulingail), GIMP (@philhart), Linoit (@JoHart) and Voki (@jofrei).

De Bono action shoes for a 2E student on Gagne’s DMGT road – Part 2

This recorded session was the second part of the double FineFocus session presented by @jofrei – Jo Freitag, creator of Sprite’s Site and co-ordinator of the Gifted Resources website

Jo began with a brief recap of the first session:

  • Edward de Bono’s Six Action Shoes which are the follow up to the Six Thinking Hats;
  • Gagne’s Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent;
  • the Six Action Shoes in the context of the Feetspeak Quest Map;
  • a reminder of the six shoes and their relationship to the Gagne DMGT model.

The main focus of this session was a consideration of combinations and variations in the shoes. We had a great time exploring the possible combinations of two shoe types to produce modified action plans. Jo also shared some extra shoe types of her own that broaden the program possibilities including Sprite’s plaster cast that symbolises the support that may be available through eligibility for funding!

A great session from Jo as always!

Serendipity

A lively recorded session that I was sorry to miss! I am writing the overview from the recording and although I am delighted to be able to catch the recording and to do this, I feel that the overview lacks the depth that comes from being there. This Serendipity ranged across several topics – Contacts for ESL; Which is better f-2-f or online; and why are outdated skills still being taught. An eclectic blend of topics which seemed to work very well! The conversation jumped around between topics often linking them together through context for example using online for ESL. The only way to do this session justice is to catch the recording!

Show and Tell about tools used with students

The third recorded session in this overview was a FineFocus in which several of us present gave a short “Show and Tell” about a particular tool that we use with students. This session was inspired by Gail (@poulingail) who had (the previous week) volunteered to tell us about her use of Voicethread.

Gail showed us the Voicethread site giving us the link for signing up. She also shared her own page and in particular a thread from her Kindy students about a visit to a nearby vernal pool, fantastic to hear such young students articulating their ideas about the pool. Gail continued – telling us about how she is using Voicethread to collaborate with other classes. One point she made of which I was only vaguely aware before is that you can give your feedback using other media than just plain recording on the site. This may encourage me to try again! A great “share” by Gail – I certainly learned a huge amount!

Next up was Phil (@philhart) who told us about the GIMP – his favourite image editor. Free and with similar features to those of Photoshop. This is the one that Phil always recommends to students who want something a bit more sophisticated than Photofiltre. Phil takes panoramic images – many images that are then “stitched” together. These inevitably need a degree of editing and to illustrate the advantages of GIMP Phil showed us how he can quickly and easily remove image flaws. Again a fascinating share!

Then it was my turn! My chosen tool was Linoit which is similar to Wallwisher. I have used this intermittently with students since myslf contributing to a fabulous global one instigated by Michael Graffin (@mgraffin) for World Water Day in 2011. I have used Linoit for students to give feedback on classess and also for short pieces of writing – often using an image as stimulus. Next year I will be asking students to write Haiku in response to an image stimulus. I enjoyed sharing Linit.

To finish off Jo Freitag (@jofrei) related her experiences with Voki (a talking avatar) and teenage boys in her blogging project completed last year. She emphasised how much the students enjoyed making Vokis and slso made the point that they didn’t, as could easily be the case with this age group feel that making Vokis was “babyish”. A terrific “word picture” from Jo to end the session.

This session was fun – it is always so interesting when different people share tools as we all gain so many insights from one another.

Our Next Session

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session where we invite you to suggest your “hot” topics for discussion – we then select the topic by poll.  Join us on Thursday November 15th 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 November 16th in Australia – in the usual Blackboard Collaborate virtual room.

Edublogs Serendipity webinar – miscellany

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Introduction

This was a Serendipity session where we didn’t vote on a topic! As has been the case often recently we were a very small group. The session was recorded and discussion centred around three areas:

  • How can we encourage more people to attend/should we continue the webinars at all?
  • Possible topics and speakers for future webinars
  • Help/ideas for getting the balance of words and slides right in Pecha Kucha

The webinars

Our attendance has always been very variable, but from late 2008 when the webinars began until mid 2011 attendance was almost always well into double figures. However during the last year this has reduced. I think this may be due to a number of factors:

  • There are now so many free webinars each week that people cannot attend all they would like to.
  • A tendency for people to “catch the recording” instead of joining in. The highly interactive nature of our webinars means that fewer participants leads to a reduced range of ideas and opinions. Also if no-one joins then eventually there will be no webinar to record!
  • The many other e-PD opportunities such as #tag chats on Twitter of which there are now hundreds.
  • Not enough publicity, forward planning of FineFocus sessions, variety of topics and variety of presenters. My fault! Work pressure has been intense for the last year. I am hopeless at asking people to present for us – I just feel totally that I am imposing on them and also worry that attendance will be low and they will feel it isn’t worth doing.
  • Timing of webinars – our early participants were mainly from the USA/Canada where it is afternoon/evening and this is often a good time for people to join. However with the huge increase in available e-PD including webinars that originate in the USA our overseas participation has reduced. We now have more Australians attending, however the early/mid-morning time is not good for many.

We discussed the above issues and also @jofrei shared her blogpost on promoting the webinars with a great mindmap of ideas. This was an outcome from a previous similar discussion last year.

We also talked a little about possible topics and presenters. Topics are usually relatively easy as it is always possible to have a discussion session about a currently “hot” e-topic or to mutually explore tools for a specific purpose. However for me finding possible presenters is a real issue. As I said earlier I am just no good at asking people – I always feel so much that I am imposing on them. Also I lack the time to find and ask possible presenters – not helped by the fact that because of work pressures I have been less active in my PLN over the past year and so I have a lower profile than previously.

If you have thoughts or ideas about:

  • whether we continue the webinars
  • how to publicise better
  • topic suggestions
  • presenter suggestions (yourself or someone you know)
  • whether we change the format (from the alternate Serendipty/FineFocus) to something else
  • whether we reduce the frequency to one per fortnight or one per month

Please comment on this post or tweet me (@JoHart)

Pecha Kucha – getting the timing right!

In this part of the session we took a look at the Pecha Kucha that @jofrei is developing about “The Tweet Family” her story of the gifted Tweetlets.

One of the main challenges is being that of timing. and so we discussed the issue of timing. For me the rigidity of the 20 seconds per slide is also likely to be my main problem with developing a Pecha Kucha. We talked about some possible strategies to overcome the difficulty of some slides needing only a few seconds of talk and others needing much more than 20 seconds.

There will be more on Pecha Kucha in our next session – “Sharing Pecha Kucha” as we will share our attempts at Pecha Kucha and discuss the challenges we found as well as the content of our presentations.

Conclusion

An interesting session! The issue of continuing the webinars or not has been on my mind for a while. Also the related concerns about the need to find topics and presenters and publicise them better. So it was good to discuss this with others. Since Pecha Kucha came up as a topic in a recent Serendipity it has interested and intrigued me and others. I am unsure that it will ever be my strategy of choice but feel it is good to try it out and our next session gives us that opportunity to “play”

Our Next Session

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session where we will be “Sharing Pecha Kucha”. In this session some of us who took part in a Serendipity where Pecha Kucha was a topic will share our “homework” and talk about the challenges. If you have a Pecha Kucha you would like to share let me know – a comment on this post or Twitter: @JoHart and bring it along.  Join us on Thursday June 28th 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 June 29th in Australia – in the usual Blackboard Collaborate virtual room.

Edublogs Serendipity webinar overview – gifted & talented students

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Introduction

Our first Serendipity session of the year was a great session! As always the session was recorded and is well worth a watch/listen for the huge amount of sharing of ideas and links. I’m sorry for the delay in posting – a combination of migraines, a visitor staying and too many things still to do before I go back to work has left me without enough time!

The Session

We started as usual by putting our topic ideas on the whiteboard and then polling to choose the topic for consideration. The winner was a double topic “IEP for gifted students” and “Behaviour strategies for gifted”.

Once the topic was chosen we started with a whiteboard for the headings and to collect some of our ideas and thoughts on this including some links. As usual ideas were also shared via text chat and audio. This was a lively session with much of the sharing via audio leaving me with a dilemma about an image/interactive for this week’s post. The whiteboard has only a very small part of those things that were shared as does text chat. So what I have finally done is to experiment with a survey!



While the survey doesn’t give us an image in the post it does give us something different to do and so meets my personal criteria for something other than just plain text in every post 🙂

 

Conclusion

I enjoyed this session – this is one of the topics that we have visited before from different angles and I am always fascinated by the different directions taken when topics are re-visited. Because we never have exactly the same group of people each week Serendipity sessions are truly serendipitous in that our direction is informed by the particular experiences of out participants each week. Love it!

Our Next Session

Our next Webinar is our first Edublogs “Fine Focus” session for 2012, where we invite you to share your favourite online survey tools in “What survey was that!”  join us on Thursday January 12th 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 January 13th in Australia – in the usual Blackboard Collaborate virtual room.

Edublogs webinar overview – Do you know Dabrowski’s Dogs?

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Introduction

This recorded, Fine Focus session presented by Jo Freitag (@jofrei) was fascinating and exciting. Jo coordinates the “Gifted Resources” information service website which includes “Sprite’s Site” where Dabrowski’s Dogs are regular visitors. She has intrigued us with mentions of Dabrowski’s Dogs in a number of sessions so it was particularly exciting to have a session devoted to them.

The Session

Jo started off by finding out where we were coming from on “Dabrowski’s Dogs”. She then gave as a great list of references so that we could find out more about the overexcitabilities for ourselves at a later stage.

Next we took a look at the dogs themselves as personifications of Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities. Jo gave us great character sketches of the dogs and also links to blog posts that explore the characterisitics.

Then it was our turn to do some work. Jo gave us slides on which to brainstorm the positives and negatives of the overexcitabilities in a classroom context and to suggest strategies for managing these.

The first of these slides is shown above. This activity was a great tool for thinking about the impacts of the overexcitabilities in the classroom context and for considering how they might be managed. As well as the whiteboard input there were also ideas shared in text chat. Jo also talked briefly about a teaching unit that can be used to help students better understand themselves.

Finally Jo asked us how we felt at this stage about Dabrowski’s Overexcitabilities which gave rise to an additional whiteboard activity for us to express whether we could see echoes of ourselves in the dogs.

Conclusion

This was a fantastic session – full of information and activities and with lots of interesting “homework” in the form of links to visit later. As always I learned much! It seems to me that a virtual classroom might have some advantages over a face-to-face situation for managing some of the negatives (particularly those characterisitics that prove distracting to others) posed by the overexcitabilities.

Next Webinar

Our next session will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday November 24that 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday November 25th 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.

Overview Edublogs Serendipity webinar – Sprite and 2E

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Introduction

We were a very small group for our  recorded Serendipity unconference webinar this week. I think this was the combination of Thanksgiving in the USA, nearing the end of the academic year in Australia, and the fact that the conference season is still in full swing. We tend to have very low numbers at this time of year and this usually improves after Christmas.

The Session

We didn’t really formally decide on a topic for this session, one just “grew” out of the initial conversation. My interest was sparked by a references to “Sprite’s Site by Jo Freitag (@jofrei). Jo told us about her cartoon character Sprite who is twice exceptional (2E). Sprite is a gifted student with a learning difficulty/difference.

SpriteSiteResize

This session was fascinating as Jo told us about (and gave us links to) Sprite’s Site where  you can read about Sprite and her learning journey. We also heard about the Gifted Resources website that Jo coordinates. This is an information service for parents, teachers and service providers involved with gifted students. Jo also mentioned #gtchat on Twitter, a weekly forum for discussion around gifted issues.

Conclusion

This session was very exciting for me with lots of “take-aways” about the issues 2E students encounter that will help me with my own students. It has also made me think about how I might better organise the resources I use regularly for literacy and numeracy and make them more accessible for others.

Our Next Session

FineFocusSmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. This week we have a treat in store as we will be joined by Sue Waters (@suewaters) the Edublogger. Sue is going to share her ideas and strategies relating to one of the topics suggested on our Wallwisher. The topic is ” How to manage using more than one Web 2.0 tool (incl social networks, virtual worlds and other comms tools) at once for education.” This is guaranteed to be a lively session as Sue’s sessions always are – she certainly always keeps me on my toes as a moderator!

.Join us on Thursday Dec 2nd at 23:00 GMT/UTC (6pm USA EST, Midnight CET) or Friday Dec 3rd at 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.