Making your blog truly YOURS!

Introduction

This post is about going into your blog for the first time and making it yours by:

  • “customising” it with a theme that you like;
  • making an avatar (image for yourself);
  • uploading the avatar into your blog profile;
  • using “widgets” in your sidebars.

Logging in to your blog

You will have been given a link for your blog. Click the link and this will take you to the public view of your blog.

Next you need to login to your blog so that you can change it to suit you. For this you will need your username and password. You should have an email with those. If you don’t know them then contact your lecturer. Click here for a reminder about how to log in to your blog.

Once you have logged in for the first time it is a good idea to change your password. Make sure you choose something that you will remember!

  1. Go to the top right of your blog dashboard screen where it says “Howdy, yourname”;
  2. Click the arrow for the drop-down menu Click “Your Profile”;
  3. Scroll right down to the bottom of the profile page;
  4. Type in your new password and then re-type it in the second box – this helps you to be sure you haven’t made a “typo” in your password.

 

Your blog theme

Your blog theme is one of the things you can change to make your blog very personal. All of our blogs have the same theme when they are first set up. They also have the same example blog post and example comment. Once you get going it is a good idea to delete the example post and comment. Changing your theme is a big step in feeling that you own your blog!

Our blogs are hosted by Edublogs on a CYOC Edublogs Campus site. One of the best known bloggers worldwide in education works for Edublogs. She is an ex-TAFE lecturer from WA – Sue Waters. Sue writes many excellent blog posts in her role for Edublogs. They include “how to” posts, information posts, ideas sharing and many others. One of her “how to” posts is this one about changing your blog theme. This is just one of several Edublogger post links that we will use to help you learn about blogging.

Making an avatar

An avatar is an image you use to represent yourself online. Some people use a photograph. I do so myself because this works for me as an educator with a large global network of colleagues. However as a student – especially if you are under eighteen – we prefer you to use another image for your CYOC blog identity. This is for safety – we will discuss this later in the course during the Digital Safety project.

There are many different sites where you can create avatars, some use a photo as the base, others give you a series of features that you can make into a cartoon. You can also use your own images as long as they are not of other people. You MUST NOT take images from the web – these belong to the persons who created them and using them may be theft! On the left is an image made with FaceYourManga. This is one that is free and also lets you save the image as a file. Some avatar sites need you to capture an image from the screen and edit it. You will learn how to do this for projects later in the course.

To create your Mangatar avatar checkout the Slideshare below:

Widgets

Widgets are the things that sit in the sidebars of your blog. They have many different functions, you can choose the ones that are most useful for your purposes and you can also move them around within and between the sidebars. Checkout this Edublogs post on widgets including the most important ones to have on your sidebars. I love to know where my blog visitors are from so some sort of graphic of this is really important for me and I always have a ClusterMap in my own blogs.

Conclusion – One last thing for you to do on this post

Once you have uploaded your avatar and added one or more widgets  add a comment to this post to tell us what was easy and what was hard about making your blog truly yours, and why this was so!

Edublogs webinar – Global Student Blogging Challenge

Introduction

In this recorded session Sue Wyatt (@tasteach) gave us a fascinating look at the Global Student Blogging Challenge soon to get underway for its first run of 2012.

The Session

Sue started with a little of the history of the Challenge which has been happening for several years and has grown phenomenally since its inception.

Sue then shared  and talked about a variety of pages from the Challenge. She told us about how the Challenge works for students and teachers.  This included a look at some of the activities and answering our questions as we looked at the pages.

There was much interest in the mentoring aspect of the Challenge. Sue asks for volunteer mentors each of whom is asked to visit and comment on a number of student blogs.

If you are interested in the Challenge and are an educator, future educator or perhaps a retired educator then please consider volunteering as a mentor. With over 1,000 students in the last Challenge and more likely for March 2012 Sue needs 30-40 mentors. As Sue said in her presentation you don’t need to be an expert blogger – the role is more about visiting, commenting and sometimes making suggestions on what students might write about. Checkout the Mentor Registration Page and be a part of the Challenge!

There are already students and classes registering for the March 2012 Challenge so if you are a teacher with class or student blogs and you want to participate it’s time to think about registering right now!

Conclusion

A great session – the Global Student Blogging Challenge is such an exciting event. Each year I try to plan for involving at least some of my students and/or colleagues. so far this hasn’t happened. Partly this is because of the complexity (for me anyway) of initiating blogging with my totally online regional literacy students who often struggle with computer literacy as well. However this year we have a project which will enable us to try out a model for getting students started with blogs by using them as a simple e-portfolio. So although the March Challenge will not be possible I still have hopes for September!

Next Webinar

Our next session will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday February 16that 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday February 17th 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 webinar overviews – three in one post

Why three in one?

Apologies all for very tardy posting! As usual the return to work after our long summer break meant a frenetic few days before returning and subsequently 2 weeks where I have felt more and more overwhelmed by the number of things I need to do.

Introduction  to Serendipity – Teachers and blogging

This recorded Serendipity session took a look at teachers and blogging – whether all teachers should be blogging and just what should be made public/included in a professional blog. We had thunderstorms during this session and I missed a bit in the middle (power outage) which took out my desktop and also temporarily my backup laptop internet (wireless modem). Everyone just carried on with the discussion – my idea of a perfect session is when everyone just carries on if the moderator drops out 🙂

The Session

We followed our usual format of putting our topic ideas on the whiteboard and then polling to choose the subject for discussion. The winner was a combined topic around “All teachers should blog” and How much private info/thoughs should we reveal on a professional blog.

We started with a whiteboard although, as is often the case when we are a small group who all have audio, the discussion was quite audio based.  Discussion ranged around the pros of blogging for teachers, should it be compulsory as part of professional development and some privacy thoughts.

Conclusion

This session illustrated to me that sometimes you just can’t be sufficiently prepared for contingencies. During the session we had a major thunderstorm and I lost power. I had anticipated the possiblity and was also in the room as a moderator via laptop and wireless modem. However the strike that put the main  power off also temporarily knocked out the wireless modem and thus kicked me out of the BbC room. Luckily the participants (all very experienced users) just carried on. In retrospect I probably should have made someone else moderator as well!

Introduction to “Do you Toon?”

The second webinar in this post was an Edublogs Fine Focus – Do you Toon? As always this was recorded. This topic happened because I have cartoons and animations on my mind at the moment. One of the mini-projects that I will be using with students in my National VET E-learning (NVELS) project “E-xtraordinary Learning For A Digital Age” (ELFADA) is for the students to explore some video and cartoon texts and then make their own and embed them in their blogs, so I am exploring the tools available so that I can focus on the easiest to use. It seemed a good opportunity for one of our occasional explore and share sessions.

The Session

When we explore tools in webinars one of the major considerations is how easy it is to learn the tool because we always have in mind the potential for using with students without them needing a long time to acquire the basics. We began with a list of 5 tools (including one iPad app which no-one explored leaving us with four). The first

activity was a look at whether we knew any of the tools. Then we followed a similar pattern to previous tool exploration sessions. Everyone chose a tool to explore from Go! Animate, Make Beliefs Comix, Pixton and Toon Way.

Having decided which tool to explore the group dispersed for ten minutes to explore their chosen tools. Then we reconvened to share ideas on: ease of learning the basics; how engaging to use; possible lessons/contexts; whether we would use with students.

Conclusion

These sessions are always both fun and informative! Exploring something new in a short time frame is always challenging but is authentic in terms of potential use with students. Students need to be able to grasp the basics of a tool quickly because it is a tool and not the primary learning objective of the activity. In my context, with often disengaged and/or not very ICT literate students, I find that tools have to be both quick and easy to learn in order to engage students and enable them to develop their “text” (visual, oral and written) creation skills.

Introduction to Serendipity – Strategies for overwhelmed teachers

Reaching the end of the marathon post with this recorded Serendipity session. This is an issue close to all of us who teach in any context. Teaching itself is demanding enough with the need to meet individual student needs across many levels, learning preferences and personal interests. Add the demands of curriculum and standardised testing or excessive audit requirements, and the increasingly heavy administrative load (this latter often the result of a requirement to justify almost every one of the myriad professional decisions we make each day) and it is unsurprising that the majority of good and conscientious “teachers” feel overwhelmed!

The Session

As always we started with ideas for the discussion topic of the week, and then moved on to vote on these. Perhaps predictably “Strategies for overwhelemed teachers” was the absolute winner. Certainly as one who has just returned to my role as a lecturer in public vocational education at the start of a new academic year in Australia I already feel overwhelmed, and for colleagues in the northern hemisphere that return to teaching after the Christmas holiday in the darkest, coldest time of the year can (as I well remember) be soul destroying in itself.

We decided to take a brief look at what it was that made us feel overwhelmed – inevitably the main culprits are those things we have to do that don’t directly relate to teaching eg admin/paperwork and also the ever moving “goalposts” imposed from outside.

Then we moved on to look at the strategies for dealing with these.

Between us we actually had two whiteboards of ideas – one is shown above. As always the discussion and sharing was not limited to the whiteboard and there were also many textchat and audio contributions to our thoughts making this a session where it is well worth catching the recording. One of the most significant things that several of us took away at the end of the session was the awareness that we all have the same issues wherever we are in the world.

Conclusion

I think this session will resonate with teachers everywhere! I certainly found it helped me with my current sense of being overwhelmed. In common with others I find/have found that my global PLN has been a phenomenal support for me in helping me to survive and manage all those pressures that overwhelm me. Often the the support comes in practical help, advice and suggestions. Sometimes it is just that with a global PLN there is someone I can connect with and chat to via Twitter in that “dark night of the soul” when once again I am up at 3am working because the “overwhelmedness” is preventing me from sleeping!

Our Next Session

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. This will be a fantastic session with Sue Wyatt (@tasteach) who will tell us about (and invite you and your students to take part in) the Global Student Blogging Challenge that she has now been running twice a year for the last few years. Join us on Thursday February 9th 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 February 10th in Australia – in the usual Blackboard Collaborate virtual room.

Edublogs webinar overview – online/social bookmarking Diigo & Symbaloo

Advance Notice

We invite you to our Christmas Party on 15th/16th December – come along with virtual “goodies” for the festive table, and if you feel inventive bring a game to share and play. After the party the webinars will be taking a two week break returning on 5th/6th January with the first Serendipity session of 2012!

PS We have been shortlisted for the Edublogs awards Thank you so much if you nominated us. If you want to vote for us (Serendipity/FineFocus Webinars in Edublogs awards click HERE to go to the site and see nominations

Introduction

This recorded, session was a look at bookmarking. I recently did a session for my colleagues on this and thought it might be worth sharing more broadly through Fine Focus.

The Session

My first task was to find out how many of us use bookmarking and which applications we use. It turned out unsurprisingly that most of us use an application to capture our favourite links. We moved on to look at the two applications beginning with Diigo. I moved all my bookmarks to Diigo a few months ago during the uncertainly about the future of Delicious. I shared my screen to look at and talk about how I am currently using Diigo. I find it works well for me and that the opportunity to highlight and sticky note links is useful because I have a lot of links with almost the same tags so seeing a couple of summarising lines really helps. I am just starting to use groups and was delighted that @TracyWatanabe was with us and willing to talk about how she uses groups extensively.

Moving on to discuss Symbaloo was an interesting contrast because Symbaloo is very visual. Again I shared my screen to show how it enables links to be organised, colour coded, categorised symbolically. It doesn’t work in quite the same way as Diigo in that you don’t simply store a link with a click on a toolbar, you have to create a tile and put it in a webmix (category) which is a bit more time consuming. However you can create great visual collections that you can share with others.

We finished with a brief look at favourite bookmarking apps and how we use them.

Conclusion

I enjoyed doing this session although I felt I that perhaps I should have modified it more – when I talked about bookmarks with my colleagues I was largely talking with an audience who don’t use them so I included the signup. I find the contrast between the two applications is interesting and feel personally that Diigo is the one I will continue to use for most bookmarking but that I will increasingly use Symbaloo for sharing – especially with students because it is so visual!

Next Webinar

Our next session will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday December 8that 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday December 9th 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.

#RSCON3 – A finger on the pulse of my PLN!

Introduction

Now that my  mental dust has settled it’s time to write about the Reform Symposium. This is the first of what I hope will be three posts and is an overview of the session I presented on iGoogle – “Keep a finger on the pulse of your PLN” – with some reflection included. The session was recorded as were all of them here is the link to “Keep a finger on the pulse of your PLN” other sessions can be accessed via the Reform Symposium Conference Spreadsheet.

I seem to have been talking about iGoogle a lot over the last year and will be continuing to do so as I am delivering a Professional Development session on it for colleagues in a few weeks. The ever increasing flow of information across our desktops generates a need for some way of handling and drawing together the threads.

The Session

This was a great session for me and hopefully also for those participating. After  a bit of scene setting we started with a poll on how familiar participants were with iGoogle and then a whiteboard for sharing ideas about what exactly it is! I also asked for people to share on a whiteboard the five main strands of their PLN so that I could get a feel for the gadgets needed by the majority – these were fior  Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader  all of which I already had on my iGoogle page.

Then it was time to tell the story of how I came to use iGoogle as my PLE hub to bring together the strands of my PLN. This introduced the main part of the session which was a “show and tell” using Application Share to share my iGoogle page and talk about:

  • how I have set up the tabs (individual pages) and organised the content
  • discuss the gadgets available and how to access them
  • look at how I draw in those threads that don’t have a specific gadget available
  • how the page can be customised (I use a different theme for each of my tabs)

I found this really exciting because as I was sharing people were opening and exploring – sometimes “dusting off” their own iGoogle (or in some cases starting their own iGoogle ac). This made the session very participative as there were practical questions coming through text chat – including as always at least one I couldn’t answer about making tabs public.

We finished with “take-aways” these are always fascinating for me because they are so varied and illustrate so well how different we all are in our perceptions and understandings. This time (very pleasing for me)  there were many intending to experiment with iGoogle as a possible hub for their own PLN.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed doing this session for several reasons.

  1. The Reform Symposium (#RSCON) events always have such a buzz about them so just being part of it is exciting.
  2. I love it when I go away with homework from my “class”. It just confirms to me again that one of the best ways of learning and embedding understanding of something is to “teach” others about it!
  3. It is another fantastic way of connecting with my PLN around the globe – these events always feel to me as though I already know most of my audience.
  4. Having a global audience has an incredible feel all of its own and I find it quite awe inspiring that people from so many different places have chosen to come and listen to me.

I’m already looking forward to the next event and would like to finish this post with some thanks! Firstly many thanks to Denise (@mrsdkrebbs)  for being a fantastic Moderator for my session. Secondly a huge THANK YOU to ALL the organisers for their tremendous contributions to the smooth running of the event – in many cases behind the scenes. Thirdly very special thanks to Shelly Terrell (@ShellTerrell) (she who needs no sleep) and Clive Elsmore (@CliveSir) (master of timezones) for their stamina and overwhelming  committment to making #RSCON3 such a success.

 

 

Edublogs webinar overview – “Can I also do that virtually?”

Introduction

Another exciting session with a number of those presenting at  “The Reform Symposium (#RSCON3)”  joining us for Elluminate learning and practise. Again we focussed on using Elluminate with a similar “roller coaster ride” to our last FineFocus through some of the tools and features from the moderator perspective. There was a lot of stress  as BlackboardCollaborate is rolling out its Elluminate replacement and people were concerned they would need to suddenly learn a completely different interface!

The Session

As for the last two weeks this was a fast moving and very interactive session with a high level of participation particularly through text. I felt I was talking, answering text questions and demonstrating /illustrating constantly. This always leaves me with the resulting concern of talking too much!  The session overview can really only give a feel for what we did. Access the  recording for a complete look at this buzzy session.

As with the FineFocus two weeks ago and with last week’s Serendipity This was very much a participant led session in terms of direction. We had an initial whiteboard for participants to suggest what they needed from the session and I had “How to” slides and examples available for a variety of Elluminate tools and strategies in case they were needed. We started with a whiteboard for people to indicate what they wanted from the session. One of the questions was a very big ask!

“Can you give us a step by step list of things to do in order to use Elluminate successfully in our #rscon3 session”

While I started replying and demonstrating/explaining some answers to other questions @philhart put together a fantastic quick list of steps!

Phil12stepsResize

As with our last session of this type the whiteboard of requests and the questions asked throughout the session determined the entire direction of the session including which slides I actually used. Sometimes it was quicker/easier just to demo “off the top of my head”

Early in the session we made everyone moderators so that they could see all the tools and also explore their functions. Activity was rapid and we looked quickly at uploading slides, the pros and cons of video images, using multimedia, application share and webtours with opportunities for “playing” throughout.

We finished as usual with  feedback polls (which were very positive about the session) and a best “takeaways” whiteboard.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed this session it is always exciting to have people wanting to find out about Elluminate , and I feel that these sorts of sessions are really good for me also. They keep me on my toes and stop me getting complacent about my own Elluminate skills and knowledge.

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday July 21st at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday July 22nd 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.

Edublogs Serendipity webinar overview – Using Elluminate as presenter

Introduction

This session was exciting! For me it also felt very strange as I had to leave half-way through so Phil (@philhart) was the main facilitator from the start, and I caught up with the second half of the session from the recording which is well worth a watch and listen. The reason for needing to leave early was an interview at work for a advanced standing as a lecturer – what is known in Western Australia as  “Advanced Skills Lecturer”. For those of you who were in the session when I mentioned this – I was successful!

The Session

We had several people who are due to present at “The Reform Symposium (#RSCON3)” who were keen to learn more about using Elluminate from the presenter’s perspective so this was the chosen topic at polling time.

We started with a whiteboard for people to add anything specific they wanted to know about and this informed the entire session. We made everyone moderators so that they could easily access the extra tools they will see as presenters. The session was terrific with masses of interaction, discussion and sharing – truly Serendipitous with everyone sharing their own Elluminate knowledge and with instant learning going on through experimentation. Takeaways were very positive.

TakeawaysResizeIn answer to a couple of the questions raised that were not fully clarified due to lack of time.

1. It is possible to use a YouTube video – there are at least three possible ways: a) WebTour which will just take everyone to the link via their own browser (usually but not always starts immediately); b) do it by putting the link into the multimedia library (in my experience this doesn’t always work); c) put the link on whiteboard or in chat for people to access (it is good practice to make the link available in chat/whiteboard anyway.

2. Using Prezi – not ideal it can be application shared but app share is not generally very good with anything that frequently updates or is “swoopy” and also not good for anyone with a slow connection.

3. Links can be shared on whiteboard or in chat. On the whiteboard you need to use the “A” tool the text edit one is not consistently clickable. Also the link needs to be “on top” ie if you circle it then it won’t be clickable

Conclusion

This was a fantastic session and Phil did a great job especially as he was “thrown in the deep end” with respect to the chosen topic. He is a very experienced and brilliant Elluminate facilitator but a little less familiar with all the tools and capabilities than myself.  If you are about to, or might in the future be presenting/facilitating and Elluminate session then this is definitely one to catch!

Our Next Session

FineFocusSmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. Again this week (by request) we will be taking a further look at using Elluminate from the presenter’s pont of view in ” Oh and can I also do this virtually?”  Join us on Thursday July 14th 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

Edublogs webinar overview – “Can I really do that virtually?”

Introduction

This session was really exciting! With “The Reform Symposium (#RSCON3)” coming up in a few weeks we were joined by several of the presenters looking to increase their Elluminate experience before the conference. The session was one of our semi-regular ones that focus on using Elluminate and on this occasion we took a “roller coaster ride” through some of the tools and features from the moderator perspective.

The Session

This was a fast moving, highly interactive and participative session. The overview can really only give a taste of events!  Catch the recording for the full flavour of this lively session.

This was very much a participant led session in terms of direction. I had “How to” slides and examples available for a wide variety of Elluminate tools and strategies in case they were needed. We started with a whiteboard for people to indicate what they wanted from the session. This and the questions throughout the session determined what slides were used and what we did!

Initially we took a quick look at setting up your screen to suit you, the importance of doing an audio check especially if you are going to be presenting or speaking at all, and at the most used of all the Elluminate features – the whiteboard.

The next part of the session was to make everyone moderators so that they could see all the moderator tools. After this the questions and activities came thick and fast. During the rest of the session we briefly explored (giving opportunities to “play” where feasible) many of the features of Elluminate that make it such a great webinar platform. Time just flew by so that we over-ran our usual end time.

WordleTakeawaysResize

We finished with some quick feedback polls which were entirely positive about the sessions and finally as usual a whiteboard for our best “takeaways” from the session.

Conclusion

This was a fantastic session! I really love these sorts of sessions where I am having to “think on my feet” to try and keep up with the pace of the action, answer everyone’s questions and step through tools on request. As always this was a terrific learning experience for me – I have my own “takeaway” which I didn’t put on the board at the end because I was answering questions. This is an improved understanding of how the whiteboard works with live links – for which many thanks to Rodney (@techyturner)!

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday July 7th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday July 8th 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.

Tweeting the word to the world from #ere2011

Introduction

Just over a week ago I spent three days attending an awesome online conference “e-learning a Realit-e”. The Australian Flexible Learning Framework (Framework)  http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/ has been holding these conferences online twice a year for a number of years. The focus is primarily on the vocational education and training (VET) sector although the innovative projects showcased are relevant across all sectors.

I have been a regular attender at the Framework’s online conferences ever since they began and have seen them grow from having only a few people registered (mostly from the South Eastern corner of Australia) in the early days to this most recent conference with nearly 1,000 registered participants. These events are the highlights of my professional development each year. Because they are online through Elluminate they offer great opportunities to network, ask questions and discuss the presentations through the text chat as they happen. Over the years the sessions have become increasingly participative and interactive as people become more familiar with the virtual room platform and its tools, and also with other ways of including interaction in an online context. We were even sent away from the final session with Sue Hickton with a challenge to use QRcodes (demonstrated in her session) in a competition published on her blog – the prize for the winner is chocolate! Visit Sue’s blog/ and enter the competition if you were at “e-learning a Realit-e” or if you didn’t attend visit the blog and find out how you can vote for your choice of winner.

Tweeting from conferences – why do it?

Since I joined Twitter about three years ago I have tweeted intermittently during various online conferences, including the Framework ones. I was so excited to be asked by the conference organisers to tweet “officially” from this one using the hashtag #ere2011. During the three days I sent around 450 tweets of around 20 words each (like doing a 9,000 paper in three days!), and was retweeted or favourited about 150 times.

Extracts from my #ere2011 Tweets TwwetCloudResize

You may ask why tweet from a conference at all? In my opinion the main reasons from the conference organisers’ perspective and that of the presenters are:

  1. Raises the profile of the conference and presenters thus encouraging people to register and join sessions. this is probably more pertinent when the conference is online, free and unlimited in numbers, as people can register and join throughout.
  2. Providing a skeletal summary of sessions as they happen – from personal experience I have found this useful when others have tweeted from conferences. I have accessed links, proceedings and/or recordings of conference sessions (both live and online) that I have not attended purely on the basis of interest generated by tweets about the sessions.

From the tweeter’s perspective (at least when that tweeter is me) there are several reasons for tweeting from online conferences:

  1. Doing those instant encapsulations is a fantastic strategy for internalising the information and learning from the sessions.
  2. It is a way of putting something in that might be useful for my PLN – I often feel I am always taking information out but don’t put much back.
  3. Save the tweets and I have a summary of the conference including many of the links.
  4. The saved tweets also provide evidence of active participation in professional development activities, although this is not yet recognised as part of a PD record in my current context I think it is only a matter of time.


Challenges

There are certainly challenges in tweeting live from a conference!

  • Actively participating and networking at the detail level through Elluminate text chat while simultaneously summarising the broader view for the Twitter backchannel poses interesting issues not least of which was typing in the right box!
  • Continuing to tweet while also taking part when the presenter includes a high degree of interaction such as frequent polling or whiteboard activities is also a challenge.
  • Remembering to tweet when the topic was of particularly absorbing interest to me (as with disengaged youth and Twitter) was also difficult.
  • My tweeting fingers felt as though they ran red-hot at times, unsurprising with 58,000 characters over 3 days (not all typed I hasten to add – links & hashtags were usually copy/pasted)
  • Getting it right – names, content, quotes! It is instant and not easily rescinded if you make a big mistake.


What made it easier than it might have been


  • My familiarity with Elluminate – I use it all the time in my teaching context and in the weekly webinars
  • The capacity in Elluminate to set up the screen view to suit my own preferences eg I always work with a large text chat box in Elluminate – this helps me avoid missing what people say in text
  • Having two screens so I was able to have everything easily visible at the same time
  • Having the Elluminate room, the conference programme and Tweetdeck all open and visible on my screens at the same time enabled me to copy/paste some text rather than typing


Will I do it again?

The answer is a resounding YES! I enjoyed it immensely and got so much from the experience. I was exhilarated if somewhat exhaused at the end of the three days. There was just so much buzzing around in my head that it has taken me until now to blog about the experience of tweeting so much from one conference.

E-ntertain, e-ngage, e-ducate?

Introduction

I was thinking yesterday about a recent event where I found myself standing up for 25 minutes in front of a potentially negative audience of colleagues. My brief was to give them a look at what is “out there” in terms of future online/e-learning possibilties that might be significant for them.

The contemplation was triggered in part by elements of a long conversation between myself @mgraffin and @philhart when we met for lunch in Perth yesterday. As seems inevitable when “e” minded educators meet we touched upon the issue of encouraging our emphatically non “e”, non tech colleagues to at least explore the possiblities and dip a toe in the water.

Consequences of Shyness

Later on when Phil and myself were cooking dinner we returned to the theme and diversified into some of the underlying personality traits, ideas and strategies that inform how we interact with students and colleagues. As a child and teenager I was paralysingly shy, would rarely speak in any group situation, and always hid at the back. However I also took part regularly in school drama productions! I found I could do this by adopting a different persona, in a way I was standing outside myself and becoming consciously an entertainer. The shyness is still there especially when I meet face-to-face with new people although I can now mask it fairly well. It fascinates me that I am far less shy in my online persona particularly on Twitter and in Elluminate. There are many possible reasons for this that I should talk about another time.

ShyPresenterResize

The tendency to stand outside and watch myself has carried over into my role as an educator. I think that one of the reasons that I am not generally good at reflecting in writing after an event is because I am constantly operating a very short duration reflective cycle during a class or immediately afterwards. This is especially so with respect to “critical incidents” so by the time I get near a keyboard (trying to handwrite reflections kills them stone dead for me) and have time to write everything has already happened in my head so writing it seems unnecessary.

Educator as Entertainer?

Anyway enough of these digressions, Phil and myself were discussing how we work with students in different contexts. As an illustration of the way I adopt a different persona I talked about the recent two day professional development forum for lecturers in my organisation. In my experience across a number of organisations both here in Western Australia and formerly in the UK these sorts of events are generally disliked for various reasons including: information overload; the time taken; and the fact that not all of the sessions will be relevant or interesting to everyone. So to be asked to speak almost at the end of the two days about a topic that is certainly not “dear to the hearts” of many of my colleagues was a daunting prospect.

I decided right from the start that whatever I did: had to be fast-paced but also conversational in style; had in some way to entertain as well as to engage; and also had to have some degree of interactivity. Being up on stage with a microphone and data projector is not the ideal situation for generating engagement or including interactivity but it can provide opportunities to entertain! Because several colleagues expressed an interest in the slides and links I had used within them I have uploaded them to Slideshare.

I work in vocational education albeit as a literacy/numeracy educator. Because of the context the vocationl skills of my colleagues are very highly valued and constantly updated so in my session I tried to draw a parallel between this and the need to have comparable skills in the teaching strategies and e-tools that suit the needs of our 21st Century learners. I also raised the issue that while we try to make learning as flexible as possible for our students using numerous blends often customised for the individual our own professional development is still tending to follow the old model of all sit in a room together and listen to speakers talking about subjects often chosen by others not ourselves. Developing and accessing a PLN, attending webinars and blogging about educator related topics are easily recorded and tracked these days so there is no reason why these shouldn’t form part of our recognised professional development. The session generated some interest from colleagues as several have arranged to catch up with me next term and talk about some of the possibilites for some of the “e” strategies in their own teaching areas.

Conclusion

When I consider how I work with my regular students I think it is critical to try and engage them but it is less important to entertain them. However when I am trying to bring colleagues on board with something new being entertaining becomes vital in order to generate a positive memory of the message.