Edublogs webinar overviews Oct 2013

Introduction

Still running behind on webinar overviews. A digest of  our recent webinars over the last few weeks.

Fine Focus – Presenting with Blackboard Collaborate

As always this session was recorded. The session was our last webinar before the Reform Symposium Online Conference #RSCON #RSCON4 and so we decided to provide a further training/practise/question and answer opportunity for presenters/volunteers.

Serendipity 17/18 Oct 2013

In this recorded Serendipity session we talked about the recent Reform Symposium Conference #RSCON #RSCON4. We were a small group and all of us had had some involvement as participants or presenter/volunteer/organiser, so the session provided an opportunity for us to share our thoughts, reflections and ideas.

Fine Focus – “Tech Smackdown”

This was another recorded session the intention was a quick tech smackdown type share of some favourite tools/applications that save time or that we use with students but we ended up discussing a variety of: tried and tested tools, some previously used with students and some new that we plan to try. All in all a great session with many shared links.

Serendipity 31 Oct/1 Nov 2013

In this recorded Serendipity session our chosen topic was “Blended Learning”. We started with a discussion on our understanding of the term blended learning, moved on to share tools that have been part of our best blended learning experiences, considered some of the advantages, and ended with a brief look at how/why we choose tools and strategies for blended learning.

Conclusion

Once again I am finally up to date with posting webinar links. Sorry again for the short session descriptions.

Our Next Webinar

FineFocusSmallOur next webinar will be an Edublogs “FineFocus” session on Thursday Nov 7th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday Nov 8th at 7am West Aus, later in the  morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual BlackboardCollaborate room.

Recent Edublogs webinars Aug/Sept – summary

Introduction

As has been the case for the last few months I have not been able to post overviews each week. So this one is a digest of  our webinars over the last few weeks.

Serendipity (1/2 Aug 2013)

This recorded session was a Serendipity session in which considered two topics. We brainstormed some way of enthusing teachers to use technology in class and then moved on to think of “5 minute fun fillers” not necessarily involving technology use.

Fine Focus – digital literacy in an adult ed curriculum

As always this session was recorded. The session was based around content from a recent webinar that I did for our Western Australian State Adult Literacy and Numeracy network. One of the main curricula used for Adult Literacy in WA has recently been re-accredited and now includes many references to digital literacy and digital texts. So I have been presenting a short series of webinars to help adult literacy teachers think about how they might come to grips with the new requirements.

Serendipity 14/15 aug 2013

In this recorded Serendipity session we took a look at supporting older people in using technology and learned about an exciting new free online course in teaching maths available through Stanford University. The course itself is now finished but is intended to re-run from March 2014 and resources from it are being made available on the “youcubed website”

Fine Focus – Playing in the Moderator Sandpit

This was another recorded session in which we took a look at some of the tools available to moderators that can be used to add interactivity to BlackboardCollaborate sessions

Serendipity 28/29 Aug 2013

In this recorded session in response to a participant question we took a look at blogging with a class of students, specifically how to get started in doing this with Edublogs.

Fine Focus – PLN? PLE? How have they changed

As always the session was recorded. We discussed and explored the terms PLN (Personal Learning Network) and PLE (Personal Learning Environment) and considered how these have changed for us as individuals over the last few years.

Serendipity 12/13 Sept 2013

In this recorded Serendipity session we looked at two topics. The first was a guided tour from @jofrei of a series of recent posts on her Sprite’s Site which followed the adventures of the Tweetlets during their Work Experience week at the Twitter Stream. Our second topic was a discussion of how we might be able to prepare training materials more efficiently.

Fine Focus – “This house is resolved …”

In this recorded session we did something a little different – I am always trying to come up with different formats and themes for Fine Focus sessions so that we don’t have “just a presentation” each week. So on this occasion I had been thinking about some of the controversial statements related teaching and learning with “e” and decided to present four of these for discussion. The four statements were:

  • Face-to-face conferences are a ‘has-been’
  • BYOD is a fad that wont last
  • You have to have a ‘maths brain’ to do maths
  • Qualifications are outdated, they should be replaced by digital portfolios

All four prompted lively discussion despite considerable agreement on each by the participants.

Serendipity 3/4 Oct 2013

There was no session on 26/27 September so Serendipity was a week later. In this recorded session we briefly discussed four topics:

  • We are Connected Educators. Anyone feeling the need to do more
  • What is involved in acting as a volunteer for the Reform Symposium (#RSCON4)
  • A success story from working for Broadband for Seniors
  • To share or not to share, how do you decide?

Conclusion

Once again I am finally up to date with posting webinar links. Sorry again for the short session descriptions.

Our Next Webinar

FineFocusSmallOur next webinar will be an Edublogs “FineFocus” session on Thursday Oct 10th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday Oct 2th at 7am West Aus, later in the  morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual BlackboardCollaborate room. In this session we will look at moderator tools from the presenter and session facilitator perspective.

Yet more catching up!

Introduction

Again, I am still lagging well behind the events in posting webinar overviews. So as with my last post this week is a a catchup with topics and recording links for several recent webinars

If it’s on the Internet it must be true! (27/28 June 2013)

This recorded session was a FineFocus session in which @philhart took us on an exploration of the quality of information on the Internet. We shared our own concerns and Phil highlighted some of his. Phil also shared some the ways he assesses/evaluates the quality/credibility of information he finds and invited us to share our strategies.

Serendipity

A very active  session – recorded as always in which our intention was to look briefly at all three of the suggested Serendipity topics. However discussion was lively and extended about the first two, so we didn’t actually reach the third! The two topics were:

  • How do you re-charge your batteries? (prompted by end of school year for several of us)
  • Who gives PD to those who give PD? (this extended into a look at the ways we access PD).

Both topics gave us full whiteboards and we ran out of time before reaching the third topic “Is numeracy and maths really a poor cousin to literacy?”

Curation tools

One of our semi-regular FineFocus recorded sessions in which we explore a few apps with similar purposes and share our ideas on their ease of use, potential for engagement and possible use with students. These sessions are always great fun and very practical as we each find out about a different tool and then share our thoughts.

Another Serendipity!

This was another recorded session facilitated by Jo (@jofrei) and Sandra (@Marndon). Both the other Jo and Phil went AWOL to present at a conference! The topics explored were digital stories and ideas for “five minute fun fillers” for whiteboards.

Why/why not? Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn

In this recorded session we discussed why or why not we each used one or more of “the big four” social media platforms and also looked at our activity levels and our particular likes/dislikes for each of them.

Conclusion

My apologies for the very short topic descriptions! I hope to return to more complete overviews soon!

Our Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next webinar will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday Aug 1st at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday Aug 2nd at 7am West Aus, later in the  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”. We post these on the whiteboard and then choose the topic for discussion by poll.

Edublogs webinar overviews – Serendipity (“good” BbC sessions), infographic tools

Introduction

This post covers two webinars. A Serendipity session in which the topic was a consideration of the ingredients for “good” BbC sessions and a FineFocus session where we explored some online infographic tools

Serendipity – ingredients of  “good” BlackboardCollaborate sessions

This recorded session was a Serendipity (unconference) session. The topic chosen was “What makes a good BlackboardCollaborate  session”. A topic about which there was plenty to share!

We extended the topic into a “playtime” towards the end of the session. This involved giving everyone moderator privileges and opportunities to try some moderator tools. As always this was fun, albeit slightly chaotic at times.

Each time we do this I am made aware of the fact that very few webinars of the many available across the globe provide much in the way of opportunities for participants to interact and perhaps more significantly the opportunity to try out moderator tools and practice developing interactive segments. This has given me food for thought and an idea for semi-regular sessions/workshops focussing on particular tools/interaction types where participants will have the opportunity to develop an interactive segment during the webinar and then share with everyone.

Online Infographic making tools

This recorded session was one on “Exploring online tools”. On this occasion we took a look at some online infographic creators.

As is usual with these sessions we started off with some of our individual thoughts on the meaning of the term “infographic”. This was followed by a look at how many of us used infographics. This revealed that as a group our usage was low with no-one using them more than rarely.

When we explore tools we have only a limited time within the webinar so it provides a good test for usefulness in a teaching situation. Anything that takes a long time to join and/or to pick up the basic use is not really practical for use with students. This is  because if it takes too long for students to learn then learning the tech can become more significant in the “lesson” than the learning objectives.

We had four tools to explore – everyone chose a tool and went away to spend 10 minutes exploring. We then shared our opinions and ideas. This was a particularly interesting session because infographic makers were relatively new to all of us. Because we generally felt we needed a bit more time this week we also gave ourselves some homework – to make an infographic to share at the start of the upcoming Serendipity session. I have made mine and look forward to sharing it in the session!

Conclusion

Two fun sessions! Sharing virtual classroom tools is something I love to do so the Serendipity session was particularly enjoyable for me. Exploring tools because it involves  high degree of participant activity is also something that I get a lot of satisfaction from.

Our Next Webinar

Our next webinar will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday February 14th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday February 15th 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 – Extraordinary Literacy Learning

Introduction

This recorded session was a FineFocus session about how we delivered a pilot (funded by the Australian National Vocational E-Learning Strategy initiative – Partnerships for Participation) adult literacy course entirely online using virtual classroom, blogs and other e-tools.

The session

Due to time constraints the focus of the session was very much on the delivery model and strategies used rather than on the student cohort/reasons for adopting the approach. I began the session with a very brief scene setting and then moved on to discuss the delivery model. Initially this was from an overall perspective followed by a more in depth look at how the different aspects fitted together.

Blogs formed the core of the student work and we had an online audience poll on blogs which indicated that (unsurprisingly) everyone had some knowledge of blogs. Then we moved on using examples from the “Course Blog” and individual “Student Blogs to illustrate how we used the blogs in the literacy context to enable students to access “How to” information, write for an authentic audience and receive feedback on their work. Although blogs were the main core of student activities we also used a course website (built in the Institute LMS) and virtual class recordings to provide supplementary resources. Links for activities were provided via Symbaloo. The structure of the course helped us to “walk the fine line” between too much control of student activities and potential anarchy and the issues arising from this.!

We moved on to look briefly at the project outcomes including some student feedback via Lino.it.

This was followed by a “Roaming Challenge” – an opportunity for session participants to access a series of whiteboards individually add their own ideas on how they might use some of the tools and strategies for specifc activities with a particular student cohort. We shared and discussed the ideas briefly and I also shared the outcomes of the same activity from a face-to-face presentation that I did for my own organisation as part of an innovation workshop.

We finished up with a second online poll to gather feedback on the session and a “best takeways” board for any other comments.

Conclusion

I so much enjoyed doing this session. The project was so exciting to do and because (in my opinion) it was very successful I love to share how we did it. The only sad thing is that my Institute has now stopped all delivery of Certs in General Education both face-to-face and online because of increasing funding constraints brought about by the requirements for public vocational education to be competitive with the private sector.

If you have something  you would like to present a webinar on please let us know (add a comment to this post, or Tweet us – @JoHart or @philhart).  Then join us to facilitate a session about your e-edu passion! If you are not familiar with BlackboardCollaborate we can help you plan how best to do your session so it works for you. Our sessions are small and friendly – the ideal setting for your first webinar.

Our Next Webinar

Our next webinar will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday January 31st at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday February 1st 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 overview – Characteristics of 2E students – Part 1

Introduction

This recent recorded session was Part 1 of another of Jo Freitag’s (@jofrei) excellent sessions about aspects of working with 2E learners. For those of you as bemused by the term as I was when I first encountered it, this is “shorthand” for “Twice Exceptional” and refers to learners who have a disability/disorder and are also identified as gifted in one or more areas.

The session

Jo started with  started with  look at where we were coming from on 2E  students and a recap on the meaning of the term. She then moved on to start describing contrasting (perceived positive and negative)  characteristics of 2E students that can pose challenges to teachers. 

Jo left lots of inviting white space around her images for us to add our ideas on strategies to overcome the weaknesses either by capitalising on the strengths or in other ways. The discussion on the whiteboard, in text chat and through audio was totally engaging! We “visited” around half of the characteristics leaving the remainder for the next session.

Conclusion

A fantastic session! Time flew by and we finished with appetites well whetted for the second part next week. If you missed the first session then catch up with the recording and join us for the second exciting episode (see below for time/date).

If you have something  you would like to present a webinar on please let us know (add a comment to this post, or Tweet us – @JoHart or @philhart).  Then join us to facilitate a session about your e-edu passion! If you are not familiar with BlackboardCollaborate we can help you plan how best to do your session so it works for you. Our sessions are small and friendly – the ideal setting for your first webinar.

Our Next Session

Our next FineFocus webinar is the Second Part of this session on the Characteristics of 2E students where @jofrei will continue to keep us busy considering how we can best meet some of the needs arising from the distinguishing characteristics of 2E students. Join us on Thursday November 29th 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 30th in Australia – in the usual Blackboard Collaborate virtual room.

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

 

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.

Two Edublogs webinars – Serendipity and Prezi

Introduction

Two overviews in one this week – a slight improvement on last time. (For the link for live webinars and info about the times and topics scroll to the bottom of this post).

Serendipity

In this recorded Serendipity the topic chosen was “How to ratchet up the rigor w/o killing the class”.

The topic was inspired by the continuing concerns over enforced curriculum and the heavy focus on standardised testing even for Kindy age groups.

The discussion was wide ranging and, probably because we had adult educators as well as Kindy teachers, there were parallels drawn between:

  • the “teaching to the test” scenario raising its head in Kindy as well as throughout the rest of the the school system and;
  • the similar need in adult education situations for learners to be following a designated curriculum leading to some sort of certification in order for courses to attract funding and be viable.

Also raised were issues around the high profile of educational publishers in testing and in teacher training as well as in resource provision. This giving rise to concerns about being “locked” in to publishers who might eventually dictate the entire who, what and when of teaching in some areas.

A very lively session with much discussion and sharing in text and by audio. I think we were all left with much food for thought!

Give yourself a Prezi

This recorded and very interactive session was an exploration of Prezi – the zooming presentation tool. We all learned much about Prezi as a result of the session!

I followed my usual practice of trying to get some idea of everyone’s current knowledge of the tool – we had all seen or tried it out.

In my experience peoople either seem to love Prezi or dislike it strongly and often reasons for dislike seem to centre around the zooming issue which can make people feel queasy. Certainly that was my first reaction to Prezi, and although I played with it a little a few years ago I have avoided it until very recently. The reason for trying again was to give students an engaging alternative to Powerpoint/Slideshare that they could also embed in their blogs.

We took a look at a simple Prezi I had made for students using App  Share to share this. Then we looked at a slightly longer one using Prezi’s option to present by sharing a link so that everyone else was able to see as I moved through the presentation. In retrospect I should have kept the App Share open at the same time because if you watch the recording you will hear and read in text what is going on but be unable to watch. However the top link on the page should take you to the Prezi.

Then we moved on to  had some discussion/comments about what might be unlikeable or likeable about Prezi, and why you might use it even if you don’t like it yourself. I also shared the links to a couple of Prezis made by two of my students.

We then collaborated on a Prezi. This was fun, exciting and chaotic! We started in App Share and then I shared the edit link.

Once we got started I closed the App Share, however about halfway through I realised how unhelpful this would be to those watching the recording so I re-started it. For me this sort of experience is one of the best ways to explore the strengths and weaknesses of a tool and learn about it.

This was a great session for me because I learnt lots more about Prezi as well as getting my head round the need to keep the App Share open for the benefit of people watching the recording. I have always remembered  in the past with Elluminate (a very memorable one for me being playing with G+ hangout in its early days)  but for some reason I find it more difficult to remember in BbC.

Conclusion

Two excellent sessions! I enjoyed them very much. The Serendipity was a subject very close to my heart that I am always happy to discuss. As for the second – as most of you probably know I love playing with tools online and collaboratively so I found this great fun, and learned so much from the mistakes I made as we went through! I do hope that I didn’t bore everyone else by being slow and getting things wrong.

I really enjoy sessions where someone else is the main facilitator. If you have something to share please let us know (add a comment to this post, or Tweet us – @JoHart or @philhart) and then join us to facilitate a session about your e-edu passion! If you are not familiar with BlackboardCollaborate we can help you plan how best to do your session so it works for you.

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 September 27th 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 September 28th in Australia – in the usual Blackboard Collaborate virtual room.

Edublogs Serendipity webinar overview – reading to dogs, why great apps close, mismatched expectations

Introduction

Again a Serendipity session where we didn’t vote on a topic! When we are only  very small group as has been the case often lately it works well for us to briefly visit several topics. This week we looked a “reading to dogs”, “why great programs/apps close” and 2stC expectations in a digital age. As always we recorded the session.

(For the link for live webinars and info about the times and topics scroll to the bottom of this post)

The session

This was an interesting session starting wih a look at “reading to dogs” a fascinating topic shared by @jofrei about “Reading Assistance Dogs” who help reluctant readers with reading aloud by being non-judgemental listeners. Jo shared a number of links, and this caused us to widen our thoughts into other animals as “assistants”

We then moved on to consider some possible reasons why what we feel are great programs/apps disappear or are changed beyond recognition by being taken over.

An offshoot from this included thoughts on the proliferation of new apps many of which seem to be very similar in purpose and which often don’t last long. My own leanings are towards using Open Source apps maintained by the community. This is because it appears to me that anything small and commercial that is good is immeditely a target for takeover by one of the giants in the field. It is then either shut down because it was a competitor or changed beyond recognition in the name of re-badging. These closures of good apps also raise issues about loss of personal data that has been uploaded and/or the complexities of removing it and transferring to a new platform. This provides a strong argument for having everything backed up in the “down here” and not just up in the cloud.

Our final very briefly visited topic was about the continuing existence of 20th Century expectations/methodologies being applied to assessment of learners who are learning using digital technology. This raised questions about: the time spent teaching the students how to use the tech tools instead of working with content; and the fact that students no longer need to learn and regurgitate content but must instead be able to evaluate information that they source from the Internet and make informed judgements on its reliability. This is definitely a topic for a full Finefocus session in the future!

Conclusion

As always a fascinating session – we almost forgot to stop at the finish time! These flying visits to several topics in a session are fun, and they work well with a small group.

Our Next Session

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. In this session Phil Hart (@philhart) will take us on an introductory look at e-publishing in “E-publish or be e-damned”.  Join us on Thursday August 23rd 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 August 24th in Australia – in the usual Blackboard Collaborate virtual room.

Two Edublogs webinar overviews – Fb privacy & Google power search

Introduction

This overview covers our two most recent webinars. This first was a Serendipity session where we discussed Facebook privacy sessions and the flow-on effects that happen between accounts. The second webinar (a FineFocus) was inspired by the recent short course in “Power Searching” from Google.

Serendipity – Facebook privacy settings

In this session, recorded as always, we discussed issues around Facebook privacy settings. This arose from one of the group recounting an experience where a family member had changed something in their profile and this had had a knock on effect on other people’s accounts.

Facebook privacy (and other) settings seem to cause issues for many people. We took a “walk” through some of these and shared how we try to use them.

They do seem inordinately complex. For example I am not entirely sure what would happen in terms of my privacy if I ticked the boxes in the window shown above. Personally I don’t use any apps and games, and I think I have all these things turned off but I am not really sure!

This was an interesting session. My concern is that if a group of quite “techie” and social network savvy people have trouble “getting our heads” around Facebook’s privacy and other settings what chance does the average user have!

FineFocus – Are you a “Power Searcher”

The second session, again recorded, was a look at some of the search features that were explored in the recent “Power Searching with Google” course that I joined. Although the interactive (forum posting) parts of the course have finished the content and activities are still available.  I was already a fairly sophisticated searcher using many of the tools explored but I enjoyed the course immensely and certainly learned some new ideas.

Once the scene setting was complete I started as I so often do with some “where are you coming from” activities, including a question about current favourite search tricks and strategies.

 

Most of the session was taken up with brief explorations and opportunities to “play with” some of the search options that I had found interesting in the course. However there was also some discussion about how we see different results and even differenct tools depending on which Google domain you are searching through. For example the “.com.au” domain gives different results to the “.com” domain. My preference is usually to use “.com” so we looked at how to force this – Google is very persistent in forcing the search into your country domain, often just typing the “.com” domain doesn’t work and the domain reverts back to the country.

We took a look at some basic search points straight from the Google course these being choice of words and the order. Then we moved on to look at images (colour filtering and finding a specific image). Next we explored the right hand information panels that appear with some searches. These are not visible in search outputs from all Google domains. They can be seen in “.com” but not (at the moment) in “.com.au”.  We finished off with a look at the “SearchResearch” blog where there is regular weekly search puzzle and an image search on “Yarn bombing” – try that one yourself if you haven’t heard the term :).

The session worked really well – quite fast paced, with a blend of whiteboard activities, app share for examples and opportunities try out the tools. Certainly for me the hour flew by!

Conclusion

Both of these sessions were great to be part of. As always privacy issues are of huge concern to us all, so sessions on this are always very worthwhile because they heighten awareness. The power search session was fun and hopefully also informative.

Next Webinar

Our next session will be an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday August 2nd at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday August 3rd 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