Edublogs Serendipity webinar overview – social media in classrooms

Introduction

This was a very lively session! Great fun with lots of whiteboard contributions and text chat – we had several people without microphones so there was a lot of discussion in text. As usual the session was recorded – please let me know if you access the recording.

The Session

We had an interesting selection of topics and combined two closely related ones “Social media in the classroom; strengths and weaknesses” and “how to talk your admin into using social media in the classroom”  for the poll. This combined topic was the outright winner!

We started with a quick whiteboard brainstorm to share our own understanding of the term social media in a classroom context. This confirmed that we all had similar perceptions.

Then, very much in the spirit of Serendipity sessions we diverted briefly to explore a question raised in text chat – namely when we use social media particularly text based “do we do the quiet ones a disservice by always allowing them an out from speaking up?” The consensus was that we need both with a strong awareness that the opportunitiy to text can build confidence. As a shy child myself I was incapable of “speaking out” in class or anywhere else and trying to force me just made it worse, so I identify very strongly with those who “lurk” and prefer to text. I very much regret that such opportunities for interaction were not available in my childhood as I think they might have helped me to manage my shyness much sooner!

The next part of the discussion moved back to the main topic and we took a look at the strengths and weaknesses of using socisl media in the classroom.

Str and Wknss resize

This whiteboard filled very fast with both strengths and weaknesses, giving us much food for thought and leading nicely into a very quick look at which of us are using social media with students at the moment and what tools we are using.

We then moved on to consider one of the eternal questions for educators – how we get others whether they be educators, admin or policy makers on board with tools and strategies that can be fully justified in pedagogic terms but are threatening in some way because they are new and challenge long-held and conservative perceptions of what teaching is about. Again we filled a whiteboard rapidly with the overall opinion being that demonstrating the use in some waythat includes the doubters is probably the most effective strategy

Conclusion

This was a terrific session – so many thoughts, opinions and ideas shared. Though as always I felt I talked too much! I think this happens more when we have people without audio because so much of the discussion happens in text and on the whiteboard so I tend to try and provide a commentary to link whiteboard and text chat.

Our Next Session

FineFocusSmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. This week in “Trouble with Timezones?” we will be discussing the issue of timezones,  sharing some of our own strategies for ensuring we don’t get event times wrong and that we can catch up with our global PLNs, and hearing from YOU about your issues and strategies around timezones. Join us on Thursday May 19th 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 – Who’s that on my blog?

Introduction

This session happened at rather short notice. Our guest presenter had to pull out at short notice. So as I recently had a spate of spam comments on my blog and had used my visitor tracking to confirm to myself that it was indeed spam – this led me to think about how much we know about visitors to our blogs. I thought this might be a topic of interest to others.

The Session

We were a very small group this week and as usual we recorded the session (please let me know if you access it) for those who were unable to attend. To start with we took a look at whether we all had blogs – we did, and whether we monitored visitors – I was the only one who did so. We touched a little on monitoring comments and conversations in comparison with the automatic monitoring that was the focus of the session.

We talked about the uses of visitor tracking/monitoring. I myself mainly use three different systems allthough I also access the standard statisitics automaticially available on all Edublogs blogs. My three systems give me different levels of information from the broad totals of visitors to the blog broken down by country, down to much more specific when, where from and which post they arrived on as well as whether they arrived as the result of a search & what that search was. I find the last very useful in helping me to confirm if comments are spam. Anyone who arrives on my blog as a result of a search for “leave a reply” is almost certain to be a spammer!

Feedjit

I used AppShare to illustrate how I use these tracking mechanisms on my own blog and how I use them to inform (to some extent) how and when I post. The last part of the session was, as usual, a look at our best “takeways” from the session

Conclusion

This session went very well even though we were so few and the topic was planned at short notice. I certainly find that using the different visitor tracking systems is very helpful for me in lots of different ways & hope that these thoughts are useful for others

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday May 12th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday May 13th 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.

Serendipity webinar overview, PLN – getting started?

Introduction

Apologies everyone – I did it again this week ie was late starting the recording. I think I may have to resort back to my strategy from before the days of the Elluminate recording reminder and have a post-it on my screen.

However I did eventually start the recording and so as always here is the recording link for the session – please let me know if you access the recording. Because I was late starting the recording the topics and poll are not captured here are the topics

Topics 29 4 11D – “Building a Professional Learning Network – where to begin” topped the poll.

The Session

We started with a whiteboard brainstorm with everyone sharing their ideas about how they had begun themselves or where they might suggest others start. The discussion was further developed in text and audio with people expanding on the points made on the whiteboard.  The focus of the discussion was mainly around Twitter but with reference to other PLN starting points such as online seminars and face-to-face conferences. There was also reference to the use of hubs such as iGoogle from an individual perspective and the increasing number of website hubs being called “PLN”s that are often focussed on being a meeting point for a particular educator group.

PLNstartResize
We then moved on to talk about a question raised by one of our group who is fairly new to Twitter, namely how to get people to follow you when you are new. This gave rise to a wide selection of suggestions on the whiteboard, in text and through audio.

We briefly revisited the map to capture the whereabouts of those who had joined after we had moved on from that point. Finally we moved on to think briefly about our “Takeaways” from the session.

Conclusion

This was a really interesting session – PLN is a topic that often surfaces in different guises and it never fails to generate lots of discussion, provide many new ideas, and deliver much learning!

Our Next Session

FineFocusSmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. This week in “Who’s that on my blog?” we discuss whether it matters to know about your blog visitors and take look at a few of the options available for seeing information about visitors to your blog. Join us on Thursday May 5th 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

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.

Edublogs Webinar overview – Twitter 201

Introduction

This session came about because I have noticed lot of  relatively new Tweeters following me recently & also had to do a very quick “Twitter 101” of the basics for a colleague just starting to tweet. This started me thinking about what happens next, once people have started to tweet, know about @, DM and RT and have joined conversations. It seemed to be time to talk about Twitter again. Twitter is one of our recurring themes, we have had 3 former webinars on Twitter, two of them back in November of 2009 where we looked at managing your Twitter account for security in “Twitter – a clean nest” and Shelly Terrell gave us a session on using Tweetdeck. In 2010 we discussed whether there should be “rules” for using Twitter. So in this session we looked at Twitter just little beyond the basics of tweeting.

The Session

As usual we recorded the session (please let me know if you access it). There was a lot of discussion throughout – especially in text but also with audio. We started with a look at what people would like to take away from the session and moved on to where we were all coming from with Twitter. Most of us already had quite a lot of Twitter experience, but that some were very new to Twitter.

We moved on to look at desktop clients, using Twitter from a phone. I App Shared my own Tweetdeck for illustrating and discussing some of the planned points and those raised throughout. This included putting out a #SerendipEd tagged tweet to my PLN for their top Twitter tips that were instantly displayed in the #SerendipEd column on Tweetdeck for everyone to see.

The discussion moved on to lists, how we use them how others use them, the usefulness or otherwise of automatically generated lists. This moved us into a quick look at account security and management to reduce the risk of scams, hacking and phishing.

TakeawaysWordleResizeThe last parts of the session were:

  • a challenge to do something different with Twitter this week and tweet about it using the hashtag #SerendipEd our tag for the Serendipity and FineFocus webinars
  • a look at our best “takeways” from the session

The “takeways” is always a really interesting question as it is sometimes the unexpected as in this session where the security aspect was the best “takeaway” for several people .

Conclusion

This session seemed to go extremely well despite my own doubts as always that it might be too “me centric”.  I always enjoy discussing Twitter and its potential because I use it so much and have gained so much from it in terms of establishing, and learning from, my own PLN.

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday April 28th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday April 29th 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.

Edublogs webinar overview – 24/7 global connectedness – blessing or curse?

Preface

If you access the link to the recording it would be great if you could either tweet me (@JoHart) or leave a short comment on this post to let me know. I would really like to know if it is useful to people when I post the overviews & recording links

Introduction

This was a facilitated discussion session. It is always a bit difficult to plan these because if there isn’t a structure they end up like Serendipity sessions and I do try to make a clear distinction between the two. However I always worry that I have structured it too much and am not giving people enough opportunities to talk and to participate generally. As always I would welcome feedback both from live participants and from anyone who has watched the recording. The topic arose because in the last 2-3 weeks I have several times seen Tweets about, or heard people speak of, the disadvantages of global connectedness. This made me start to reflect on the pros and cons and it seemed a good topic for discussion by a group of highly connected people.

The Session

This recorded session was very interactive with lots of chat and audio as well as whiteboard brainstorming. We began in the usual way by asking what participants wanted to take-away from the session. The next step was taking a look at how 24/7 connnected we are, including a poll on how connected we perceive ourselves to be and whether we like the idea of 24/7 global connection.

We moved on to explore those aspects that we see as negative. This was done initially using the whiteboard, followed by audio and textchat discussion.

NegativeResize

Naturally, we then considered the positive aspects in a similar whiteboard that you can see if you access the recording. When compared it seems that we felt that the positive and negative aspects were about evenly balanced.

We returned to the negatives to consider how we can manage them to reduce their impacts. Suggestions were mainly around taking “time out” in some form and checking information before disseminating it further.

The overall consensus was that being 24/7 globally connected is both a blessing and a curse!

Finally a challenge! For anyone who reads this post, was in the session, or catches the recording.

Do one thing this week to either:

  • Reduce the impact of a negative
  • Increase the impact of a positive

aspect of 24/7 global connectedness

Then tell us about it either on Twitter with the hashtag #SerendipEd or with a comment on this post.

Conclusion

This session was great fun for me and hopefully for the other participants also. I do so much enjoy the discussions as I always go away with so many new insights and hearing lots of different perspectives on the impacts of being connected was particularly exciting. My main take-away was to keep myself  aware of the negative aspects and work to manage them. I so love the opportunities for getting a global perspective and having someone to talk to in the small hours when I can’t sleep that I sometimes forget that there are negatives!

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday March 31st at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday April 1st 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.

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.

Overview Edublogs webinar – Be the spider at the centre of YOUR web!

Exciting News!

As I write this post the shortlists for the Edublogs Awards have just become available so this means we can now vote. I was so excited and honoured to see that the Edublogs Live webinars have been shortlisted in the “Best Educational Webinar Series” category. If you want to check out the nominations and maybe vote for Edublogs Live webinars then follow the link. Thank you so much to those who nominated!

Introduction

This was a terrific Edublogs Fine Focus session (recording here).  Sue Waters (@suewaters) the Edublogger joined us to share her ideas and strategies relating to one of the topics suggested on our Wallwisher. The topic was “How to manage using more than one Web 2.0 tool at once for education”. This was an active and engaging session from start to finish. Sue kept us busy with polls and whiteboards throughout.

The Session
Sue began by asking us which tools we use – the resulting whiteboard was well filled and makes a great Wordle!

Web2ToolsWeUse

Sue then placed the ball firmly in our court by asking what we wanted to know and then finding out about our own challenges, concerns and strategies that have worked. Next Sue moved on to talk about some general strategies for managing a mix of tools, again she invited whiteboard input from everyone. Then Sue shared some of the strategies used in (@tasteach) Sue Wyatt’s Student Blogging Challenge to manage the large number of participants and blog visits needed. Finally Sue shared some of the specific tools and strategies she uses for communicating and managing her huge daily inflow of information and some of those she uses for sharing and networking.

Conclusion

Sue’s sessions are always full of activity with lots of whiteboarding and polling as well as text chat and audio contributions. If you missed the session it is well worth catching the recording for all the wonderful nuggets of information from Sue and also from everyone else.

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 Dec 9th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (6pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Dec 10th at 1am CEST, 7am West Aus, 10am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room.

Advance Notice

Our last session this year on Thursday Dec 16th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (6pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Dec 17th at 1am CEST, 7am West Aus, 10am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room will be the usual End Of Year/Christmas Party. So bring along virtual goodies to share and please get your thinking caps on and devise an Elluminate Party Game for us to play.  If you have an idea but aren’t sure how to make it work in Elluminate then put a comment on this post or catch me on Twitter (@JoHart).

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.

.

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 – Your PLN, what’s in it for ALL of us?

Introduction

This recent recorded session was a “Fine Focus” follow up to the preceding Serendipity session where we had looked at two topics. The second of these – a fleeting glimpse of PLNs was a bit “short-changed” in terms of time, so it seemed like a good idea to have a session on the significance of PLNs and some of the tools we each use. It must be emphasised that this was not a session on developing a PLN but very much a sharing of how our own PLN works for us and an opportunity to take away different ideas and tools.

The Session

As always with Fine focus sessions that I facilitate I gave the session a clear structure to differentiate it from Serendipity which are deliberately unstructured unconference sessions. Firstly we spent a few minutes sharing our understanding of the term PLN, and then highlighting its most important aspect for each of us.

MostImprtntNext we shared our own particular key tool – the one we felt played a pivotal role in our own PLN. Then we moved on to a look at how our PLNs look in our own minds. For this I tried out an experiment in using Elluminate slightly differently as I am always looking for alternative ways of doing things. Instead of using individual breakout rooms the group used their individual Elluminate work areas to draw a diagram/picture of how they perceived their PLN.  We then transferred these to the whiteboard with limited success. As an alternative to breakout rooms (when there are bandwidth issues  or time constraints) I think this has the potential to be a useful Elluminate strategy. I just need more practise and to be much clearer in how I explain the “how to”. We finished up with sharing the one tool or idea we felt we might take away from the session.

Conclusion

This was (for me) a really interesting session as I always enjoy finding out about how people use their PLNs. I also very much value that these sessions give me the opportunity to maintain and extend my Elluminate skills as well as to learn about other tools and strategies . I also had a great “take away” from the session in Yammer.  I have now explored this and begun a network for my workplace with several people already joining.

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 2nd at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Sept 3rd 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

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.