Mobile learning is something that I hear a lot about, but I listen passively because I’m just not sure how it could work in my classroom. We do a lot of capturing of images with our phones in class, whether it’s of designs and work during technology class or snapping a photo of the homework or notes on the board. But it still nags at me knowing that almost every single student in my classroom has a mobile device and I’m not taking advantage of that fact and leveraging it for learning somehow.
I tried creating a poll about our next technology unit. I teach technology and we can do design technology (creating physical products) or computer technology (computer-based products). Since we are a new school with limited resources aside from the laptops and a wireless signal, most things are computer products. However, I have some options for students and want to see what they are interested in doing.
I often test new ideas with my oldest group of students. When I talked about this polling idea a few immediately pointed out that many students wouldn’t want to participate since they don’t have unlimited SMS plans – they wouldn’t want to waste a text on something school-related. I understand this.
Aside from polls, I’m trying to think about other ways to use the devices. I wanted to do a project with nature poetry and asked students to snap photographs of nature that they encounter that inspires them and write about it. However, I ran into the fact that the group had a few cell phone holders and a few didn’t.
I think utilizing personal mobile devices is something better saved for high school classes where the teacher knows that all students have them. However, schools with class iPod touch devices could do a lot. I could imagine loading up the devices with audio files for foreign language classes, sharing recorded lectures and videos.
This project is written for an audience of my colleagues and the management at my school. My hope is to keep this project moving forward as we move into the new year.
-Need and Opportunity-
The International School Breda is a brand new international school in The Netherlands. As a new school, there is a lot of room for improvement and to spearhead new ideas and innovations from the ground up rather than implementing them into an existing culture.
Our secondary school is working with a curriculum that is focused on student-directed and project-based learning. However, without ongoing reflection on the learning, projects and experiences can be quickly forgotten and left behind. For this reason, we need to create a dynamic space that students can take ownership of in which they reflect upon and document their own learning.
I am proposing a network of blogs modeled in the style of the Yokohama International School Learning Hub. While we are a very small school at the moment, the goal is to self-host this blog network and create something that we can easily grow into. It may seem like a large undertaking for such a small school, but the reasons for implementing a network of blogs now is to avoid having lots of blogs and sites scattered about the internet. We want a centralized space for learning. It is very easy to create a stand-alone blog, but going this extra step will ensure we have some level of control over the blogs and customization. The blog platform software WordPress is free and has a very active user community that can provide support through forums when needed. There will be some costs in server space and time and help from our ICT team to get it up and running. There are many alternatives available online for e-portfolios and blogs, but WordPress is the most cost-effective and flexible while still being very user-friendly.
There is a wealth of research available regarding e-portfolios and blogging in education. However, I always turn to Dr. Helen Barrett for ideas and inspiration about e-portfolios. She has a very focused interest in education and has created great models of e-portfolios on her site using a number of different resources, including WordPress. These models made it easy for me to compare pros and cons of each platform alternative and make an educated decision beyond just my own experience. Another resource I am learning from is Kim Cofino, Technology & Learning Coach at the Yokohama International School. She has experience implementing the same sort of hub I would like to implement at ISB and has been gracious enough to document the process and share ideas and resources on her website. I also have a Twitter friend that recently helped guide his school through creating the same network. Both have been kind of enough to respond to questions and thoughts about this project.
One of the biggest challenges I have had in thinking about this project has been how to balance creating a space that is reflective and dynamic and thoughtful (what most people think of when they think of blogging) while also being a showcase of learning featuring pieces self-selected by the students (the portfolio part of this). I thought this challenge was something I was experiencing due to a lack of understanding about how to handle the blogs, but it seems this is a dilemma for most educators implementing such a system. Dr. Barrett published a chapter of a book about e-portfolios that deals with this exact topic and compared the blog e-portfolio to a Roman god with two faces looking in opposite directions. I realized I wasn’t alone. I am using Dr. Barrett’s research and particularly that chapter to better understand how to approach a space that has essentially two purposes as I think about how to meld them. If I am having trouble seeing how to approach the two purposes, I know students and colleagues and administrators will too. Dr. Barrett also discusses how to use blogs in formative assessment, which can be interesting for us as we deal with formative and summative assessments throughout units.
I had hoped to implement some blogging lesson plans with my students in the technology lessons and get them reading and commenting on blogs in preparation for having their own, but that didn’t happen given our schedule and the time spent on a previous unit’s project. However, I am currently designing a unit for the next semester that incorporates this throughout. As the English teacher, I ask students to complete independent reading on their own and I plan to do the same for technology using “independent blog reading.” This is an effort to introduce students to RSS, blogs, and commenting all at once. I have been in touch with teachers at other international schools who have students actively blogging. After practicing together in class, I plan to ask students in Years 4&5 to read and follow at least one other student blogger and engage in blog commenting. All of this will be in preparation for when the students have their own blogs through our network.
Once the project is fully implemented as I hope it will be, the measure of success will be in the number of teachers incorporating reflective blogging into their lessons and tasks and in how well the students take to the blog spaces for both reflection and showcasing their work. My hope is to see lots of posts categorized and tagged correctly by students and a network of teacher blogs that aren’t just about assignments, but also incorporate reflective learning as a model for the students. This is all way off and the definition of “ultimate success,” but it is something I want to aspire to.
To break this goal into more manageable pieces, the first goal is to pilot a blog for the primary school written by our Head of Primary. She will write the posts and invite guest posts from the primary school teachers. The blog will show snapshots of the learning going on in school and communicate with parents, building a sense of community digitally since our website is lacking in that respect.
-Application of TPACK-
While the initial goal of the blog is to make it a portfolio space, with hopes of it becoming a personal, reflective blog (something aside from the content of the subjects), there are still aspects of it that can make any content more accessible or accessible in different ways. This will be particularly true if and when teachers engage in the practice of blogging and use their blogs as an added layer to the classroom. Blogs are designed to make reflection and conversation easy, but as the old cliche goes, you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Online discussions can be powerful ways to engage with content and can bring out the more shy, quiet students that prefer to sit back while the “usual suspects” dominate. However, we have all seen the dusty old blogs with great content and not a sole commenter in sight. Cultivating online community is a delicate art. This will be a focus as we ease into the blog space. If the classrooms do not have an open, sharing culture, a blog will not create that for it. Those aspects of community must be in place first for the blog to be successful. From the portfolio perspective, students will be confronted with the work of their peers, both showcase-worthy and works-in-progress. While this should not be the ultimate goal of the blog space since it can be so much more, it will in a way serve as a virtual bulletin board showcasing the work of the students with the added context of reflective blurbs written by the students. So often we create content individually and present it only to our teachers and sometimes parents. Through the blog we will bring it out of the individual and into the public space. It brings the interaction and discussion into the public, opening up the possibility of not only student-teacher interactions, but student-student, student-parent, and student-world interactions.
While this project is not limited to one content area, I will use my subject of language arts as an example. In this class we do a lot of writing and reading, content consumption and content creation, all of which can be enhanced through interaction. We see this in social media environments like Goodreads or the thrill of the annual NaNoWriMo. This may not be the case for every student (for some the public, social aspect of blogging might be nerve-wracking at first), but it can be an overall enriching experience to bring your content consumption and creation into the open. Rather than answering discussion questions about a chapter in a novel, we might bring that discussion into a blog posting and thread comments around it. A blog or even a single comment says inherently two things: “I have something to say” and, more interestingly, “you are free to pushback against what I have to say.” Students can comment on the writings of one another or the video production or the photography. The same text-to-self, text-to-text, text-to-world connections of language arts can happen in a blog space, but this time they can happen with the creations of students being the text and not just the the writings in textbooks. Students can become the experts. Students no longer have their teacher as the only model, but can see one another as models and co-creators of content. They can lead the discussions within their own blogs if they so choose. Empowerment is a focus of my language arts classes and I believe the public nature of blogs can help cultivate that, though we will of course focus also on being open-minded and thoughtful – being open to the idea that we might be wrong but not being afraid to be so publicly and learn from our mistakes.
Additionally, blogs are inherently chronological and allow for tagging with metadata. Students can see their progress develop over time and watch themselves change if used correctly. For example, this Wicked Problem project features small parts leading up to a whole, summative assessment. The same is true for our students. They work on formative tasks leading up to a summative one that asks them to pull on practiced skills and apply concepts learned through those formative assessments. The blog will ask students not to give up on a task when the deadline hits, but to engage in active reflection and cataloging of that learning experience so as to consult it later and hopefully improve.
-Implementation-
Implementing this project did not go well, but that was mainly due to the massive nature of the project. I knew it was big, but I didn’t realize how big until I was in the thick of it, which made starting and finishing it pretty impossible in the few weeks of this course. I am in the process of revising the project and breaking it down into manageable pieces. Since our ICT team is quite busy with other projects at the moment, I am starting with the education side of things with students and teachers. I would be happy to share these lessons with you as an introduction to blogs and bring you up to speed on this medium if you’re unfamiliar.
A surprise during the process has been the agreement of our Head of Primary to pilot the school blogs. She will be writing the primary blog and posting snapshots of student learning, student work and communicating with parents. She will also invite postings from the primary school teachers. She has very positive experiences with blogs in the primary setting and I can share my experiences with them as a secondary educator – together my hope is that we can be resources for you all as we implement this technology at ISB.
-Findings and Implications-
This project did not get implemented as planned, but I learned a great deal in just attempting it and have adjusted my specifications for success and broken the project down into pieces. I am addressing this project in terms of stakeholders – educators, students and ICT. I myself am vowing to model the reflective practice I’m promoting by posting more often to my personal blog and class blog. Surveys will go out to students, to staff and possibly to parents after the holidays to gauge opinions and levels of experience around blogs. An ongoing unit of technology will be reading and commenting on blogs, which will introduce students to RSS feeds, blogs and constructive commenting. I will also be working with the primary teachers on blogs and you are more than welcome to join us as we try our hands at blogging.
I can share countless blogs and educators with you that model the sort of reflection and learning that can happen as a teacher who blogs, but you’ll never really know until you start exploring it yourself. I have created a resource list for you in diigo to peruse when you have the time. Keep an eye out for a survey from me. I am happy to be a resource if you are interested in finding out more about blogs. I hope you will join us!
My professional (and very personal) learning plan was difficult to get down on paper. I felt like I was going everywhere with it and had lots of ideas and paragraphs starting and stopping. I decided instead to try and visualize the goals through a mindmapping program and that is where the sections of the plan became more clear to me. I use a mindmapping program on my computer called MindNode. It’s very simple, with few bells and whistles, but it gets the job done. I will explain the sections of the map in detail through this blog post. Click the image below to see a larger version of the map:
This is the second time in just a few months that I have been asked to create a professional learning plan. The first was in CEP 810 when I created a personal technology plan. It is amazing how in just a few months my interests and goals have changed. It is to be expected given all the new things I’m learning in this MAET program, but at some point I am going to have to settle down on a few manageable goals. I love checking things off lists and completing things, but I have a nasty habit of creating big, amorphous goals that are hard to see clearly and even harder to identify as “complete.” Learning to focus and complete tasks is an ongoing goal for me and appears again in my brainstorming.
Productivity & Workflows
I seem to be on an endless search for a workflow that works for me. With a new job and a graduate program, I need a system. However, I seem to have trouble sticking to one since nothing seems to fit “my situation.” One of my main goals for this next year is to focus on my personal and professional productivity so that I can be a better teacher and a better person. My work life and home life seem to bleed endlessly into one another and I can see a lack of clear workflows and systems as the culprit. I am continuing to practice Getting Things Done as best as I can since reading the book by David Allen during CEP 810. I am dedicating my entire plane flight back to the U.S. for the holiday to this very topic. This is important not just for my home life, but as a teacher I need to model good organization and project management. My students need timely feedback and an organized instructor. This is hard to do with a million things floating around in your head on a non-existent to-do list.
Networking & Professional Development
One of my other goals is closely related to my bigger workflow goal (everything is, really), and that is to be more intentional in my social networking and professional development. I seem to have developed a poor habit of passivity. Adding something to Instapaper here, bookmarking something in Diigo there, but nothing seems to come of it. I attribute my lack of a system and the discipline to stick to one as the main problem. I enjoy being a networked learner that my colleagues can turn to for ideas, especially when it comes to technology and learning. However, I know that I am not working to my potential given the mess that is my system at the moment. I want to avoid wasting time away mindlessly clicking things and use social networks professionally or socially at the right time. The same goes for my RSS feed. My time is very limited and I need to have goals in order to utilize it effectively.
Reflection
This is a big one. I have a blog that has been sadly neglected. The irony is that I started it when I began my teaching licensure program with the intent of updating often and sharing my experiences as a public reflection. However, when the real teaching started it was the first thing to go. I want to return to this and make it a priority in my workflow. I really admire a fellow international school teacher named Mark Kilmer who shares great stuff on his blog and models the type of reflection I want to be doing. I need to model the sort of reflection I want my students doing, especially if I hope to achieve success in executing my Wicked Problem Project.
Technology
I have a lot of technology goals – many of them still on the list from my time in CEP 810. However, since I am focusing overall on workflows and productivity, I want to be more intentional about my devices and where they all fit in my life. When should I use paper and when should I reach for the tech? While I love technology and exploring new things, I need to also remind myself to use the right tool for the right job. In addition to this workflow goal, I want to improve my video and audio editing skills. During the Group Leadership Project, I was inspired by our work with Camtasia Studio and want to get better at it. I have a 30 day trial and am considering purchasing a license if I can use the tool enough to justify that before the trial is up. I also want to keep room for fun with technology. I really want to get into the Minecraft world and see what it’s all about. I have an invitation to explore from a fellow international school teacher and I just need to find the time to get in there and see what the fuss is all about.
That is just a glimpse into my professional learning plan. While I wish I could list a lot of cool tools and things I want to try, I can see that my biggest need right now lies in dealing with my productivity and workflow issues and visualizing all of my buckets of responsibility.
I have learned so much during these past three classes in the MAET program and am truly looking forward to what is next.
My group member Angie and I chose to explore the tool Voki and teach it through Camtasia Studio. It was my first time using Camtasia Studio, but Angie had some experience and said it was great. I have experience using other screencasting tools, like Jing from the same company, so I trusted her judgment and went ahead and downloaded the free trial. We needed a screencasting app that would allow us to edit and zoom and patch our individual sections together while not having a time limit.
However, this was my first time using Camtasia and I have to admit that it was a steep learning curve. I had trouble figuring out how to zoom and how to edit the final product. I figured things out in the end, but I think Angie and I should have done a serious trial run/dress rehearsal of our project before trying to patch the two pieces together. The timing of the project would have become more clear (we were over by a few minutes and Angie had to cut a lot) and we might have ended up with a slightly smoother transition from part one to part two. I recorded my part at a different resolution, it seems, than Angie did. We both selected “web,” but the recordings do look a little different.
Despite these downsides and “lessons learned,” I really enjoyed using Camtasia and plan to use it in the future. I like the program and want to explore it more while I have the 30-day trial. If I like it enough I may purchase a license, because I like being able to record any length of screencast I want and edit it. Jing limits you to five minutes.
If we were to do this over, I think Angie and I would both do a trial run of the parts of our presentation to gauge the length and cut from there. We had a great storyboard and speech notes, but clearly they amounted to a far too lengthy presentation. We lost our group member early in the project, so I think we might have overcompensated with our parts after worrying we wouldn’t have enough time to fill the assigned 10 minutes. Clearly we were wrong! I would also learn more about Camtasia and try to create a presentation with smoother zooms and transitions. I felt like I needed a more in-depth tutorial about Camtasia before beginning.
All that said, I think we ended up with a fabulous presentation and it is in great thanks to Angie. She was experience with Camtasia and took on the editing portion. I know from editing my part that this is no small feat, so I was lucky to have her in my group. Please enjoy our professional development about Voki.
This project is still in its early stages. Not because it isn’t a worthwhile project, but because it is an incredible undertaking and one with many moving parts I didn’t consider in the early stages. I realize now (as I so often do) that my goal was far too big and difficult to manage as a whole. I should have broken this Wicked Problem down into smaller, more manageable and executable projects. Having a large project without a clear focus makes it difficult to actually make any noticeable progress. As a Getting Things Done fan (and one that is still very much trying to learn and implement the GTD philosophy in my work), I learned that having a big, amorphous project like this is guaranteed to end badly because you don’t know where to start.
If I had another chance to approach this problem in a different way, I would first break it up into the various stakeholders and approach each one in a different way versus looking at this as one project. It is not, there are many parts that could be broken up into many different ways, such as:
1. Students – I would start earlier educating students about blogs and portfolios. I think many students either think of portfolio as an art class requirement or remember the paper writing portfolios of their English classes. So often I’ve seen the reflection portion of the portfolio left aside in favor of mere “collecting” of student work. I want to focus on reflection and get students practicing this act at various points during projects and at the end of each task. On the blog side of things, I will implement a blog reading requirement in my technology class to get students reading model blogs and hopefully commenting. I plan to conduct “how to comment” lessons as part of digital citizenship and digital literacy lessons.
2. Teachers – I am currently surveying my colleagues about this proposed project. Everyone is overwhelmed with work at the moment (what teachers aren’t?), so I am not expecting full participation. However, I think it is important to include my colleagues. A project like a blog/portfolio network will not be successful without buy-in. I am surveying them not just about blogs, but about their opinions of portfolios and of reflections – what value do they see in these aspects of education? It will help me to know the sort of climate into which I am aiming to implement this project. I am conducting the survey based on feedback I received during this project. I am asking colleagues to answer some questions and, if they really want to help me, look at some example portfolios and say what they link/don’t like. I am also providing links to research about portfolios and student reflections in case they too want to learn more about this topic. Our curriculum framework focuses a great deal on iteration of learning and reflection upon learning, so I’m hoping they will find the research valuable aside from the portfolio focus.
3. ICT – I really need the help of our ICT team if I’m going to get this right. We are a small school, which allows me a ton of freedom most teachers don’t have. However, I want these guys behind me since I may have to holler for help. I plan to set up a meeting with them after the school holidays to get their opinions about web hosting and servers. If the school grows we will need server space for storing student portfolio work.
4. Me – I need to be a better model of reflective practice and plan to do so in my blog. I aim to start posting discussion questions to my blog to serve as a sandbox to practice commenting before sending students out with their own RSS feeds for commenting.
Despite not being able to implement the entire project during this course, I am continuing on with the work with a goal of at least implementing by the end of the school year. This doesn’t mean that all students and teachers will be using the blogs, but I want it to be there so we can work with it over the summer and kick off the year with a bang and a working portfolio system.
Our web conference as a group experienced a number of hiccups from the start. We chose to give Yugma a try and our group member Sharon set up a room. We received an invite with a log-in code by email and everything seemed fine – that is until we actually tried to have our meeting. Angie and I could easily access the room, but the room told us that it was waiting for the meeting leader (Sharon) to join in. We were in communication by email and the ANGEL discussion forums and Sharon was not able to access the room. She kept getting an error message. She tried creating a new room and experienced the same issue. We went into damage control mode since I am six hours ahead of Angie and Sharon and it was quickly getting late. I tried researching the error message while Angie created an Adobe Connect room as back-up. I received no support or tweets back from Yugma, so we abandoned it and all joined in an Adobe Connect Room.
Clearly Yugma is not a conferencing tool I would recommend to anyone. Web conferencing is tricky business and the quickest way to ruin it is with tech glitches like this. Adobe Connect was a much better option. Angie had never created a room before, but she got one up and running easily. I have been a participant in an Adobe Connect room before, so I was familiar with the tools. We used the webcam and chat features and experienced only a few tech hiccups. The glitches were small and did not affect the overall experience. My only gripe about Adobe Connect is that it seems to have much more of a delay than the other tool I’ve used called Blackboard Collaborative (previously known as Elluminate). As I am typing, if I type too fast for Adobe Connect it will eliminate letters in my words and sentences. Since the chat feature is something used by people who don’t have the bandwidth to use the microphone or webcam successfully, this seems like a big problem to me. I was connecting from Europe with Angie and Sharon in Michigan and we had a lot of delay. I resorted to just using the chat window, which was fine aside from Adobe cutting off words and sentences. I type fast, but not that fast! Next time I will reach for Adobe Connect since, despite its few downsides, it is much easier to use and from a reliable company.
I am not sure yet how I might use this tool in the classroom. I think it would be a great addition to group work for my students. The Middle Years Programme of the International Baccalaureate that we follow includes something called Approaches to Learning – these are skills that students should have when they leave school. Working successfully in a team and utilizing tech tools effectively for the right jobs are big pieces of the “ATL” skills. I would like to make collaborating with a group by video conference a requirement at some point in my tech class just so I can expose students to the experience.
At first I was concerned that I would be out of my comfort zone for this assignment. I’ve done collaborative presentations with a group, but never a video. However, after completing the storyboard and script I am much more comfortable and know that we’re putting together a useful bit of PD to share about Voki.
My partner Angie and I worked on putting a slideshow together of mostly images that we will zoom in on using Camtasia Studio while speaking over our screencast video. We are exploring the tool Voki and how to use it in the classroom. I come from the language arts and technology side and teach middle school and early high school. Angie teachers high school social studies. We tried to create a presentation that reaches a wider audience with ideas beyond the liberal arts.
I completed the first part of the storyboard and script up to slide six, with a little help from Angie regarding building community with Voki, and Angie did the rest. For the recording part we will both serve as “actors” and Angie will mesh the Camtasia recording together. I will be finding more links to serve as “further reading” at the end of our show. We have our script in the speaker notes of a Google Presentation, but also have it shared the script in a Google Document.
The title of this post is a bit deceiving since the implementation aspect of this project has been going far slower than I anticipated, but I’m cutting my losses and going for a new angle so I can at least prepare students for when the portfolio system is implemented.
You can learn more about my project so far by listening to an audio posting. Click the link below!
I found this part of the Wicked Problem project to be the most difficult. It is easy to have an idea and daydream about the best case scenario, but another to sit down and consider whether this move will truly enhance the education or just be another “shiny, new thing” that clutters the planning of the teachers and the work load of the students. That said, I pressed on and consider this a rough draft of how this project meshes with TPACK.
While the initial goal of the blog is to make it a portfolio space, with hopes of it becoming a personal, reflective blog (something aside from the content of the subjects), there are still aspects of it that can make any content more accessible or accessible in different ways. This will be particularly true if and when teachers engage in the practice of blogging and use their blogs as an added layer to the classroom. Blogs are designed to make reflection and conversation easy, but as the old cliche goes, you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Online discussions can be powerful ways to engage with content and can bring out the more shy, quiet students that prefer to sit back while the “usual suspects” dominate. However, we have all seen the dusty old blogs with great content and not a sole commenter in sight. Cultivating online community is a delicate art and I don’t pretend to know a formula for making it work like a machine (does anyone?). This will be a focus as we ease into the blog space. If the classrooms do not have an open, sharing culture, a blog will not create that for it. Those aspects of community must be in place first for the blog to be successful. From the portfolio perspective, students will be confronted with the work of their peers, both showcase-worthy and works-in-progress. While this should not be the ultimate goal of the blog space since it can be so much more, it will in a way serve as a virtual bulletin board showcasing the work of the students with the added context of reflective blurbs written by the students. So often we create content individually and present it only to our teachers and sometimes parents. Through the blog we will bring it out of the individual and into the public space. It brings the interaction and discussion into the public, opening up the possibility of not only student-teacher interactions, but student-student, student-parent, and student-world interactions.
While this project is not limited to one content area, I will use my subject of language arts as an example. In this class we do a lot of writing and reading, content consumption and content creation, all of which can be enhanced through interaction. We see this in social media environments like Goodreads or the thrill of the annual NaNoWriMo. This may not be the case for every student (for some the public, social aspect of blogging might be nerve-wracking at first), but it can be an overall enriching experience to bring your content consumption and creation into the open. Rather than answering discussion questions about a chapter in a novel, we might bring that discussion into a blog posting and thread comments around it. A blog or even a single comment says inherently two things: “I have something to say” and, more interestingly, “you are free to pushback against what I have to say.” Students can comment on the writings of one another or the video production or the photography. The same text-to-self, text-to-text, text-to-world connections of language arts can happen in a blog space, but this time they can happen with the creations of students being the text and not just the the writings in textbooks. Students can become the experts. Students no longer have their teacher as the only model, but can see one another as models and co-creators of content. They can lead the discussions within their own blogs if they so choose. Empowerment is a focus of my language arts classes and I believe the public nature of blogs can help cultivate that, though we will of course focus also on being open-minded and thoughtful – being open to the idea that we might be wrong but not being afraid to be so publicly and learn from our mistakes.
Additionally, blogs are inherently chronological and allow for tagging with metadata. Students can see their progress develop over time and watch themselves change if used correctly. For example, this Wicked Problem project features small parts leading up to a whole, summative assessment. The same is true for our students. They work on formative tasks leading up to a summative one that asks them to pull on practiced skills and apply concepts learned through those formative assessments. The blog will ask students not to give up on a task when the deadline hits, but to engage in active reflection and cataloging of that learning experience so as to consult it later and hopefully improve.
Coordinating virtual meetings and conferences is very easy these days, but often times things don’t go as planned. When problems arise, one has to solve them quickly. This is a skill I hope to teach my students and model for my colleagues as we integrate tech in our school. Our group brainstorming session was a perfect case study in how to turn on a dime and still make use of that precious time.
We initially tried to use Yugma as our conferencing tool. Sharon set up the meeting room, we received our emails ahead of time, and logged into the room successfully. We waited and waited, but still no Sharon. Our meeting organizer was locked out of the room. I tried tweeting Yugma with no response, researching her error message, etc., but nothing seemed to fix the problem. It was our problem now. Angie and I met on Skype to try and come up with a solution. We knew we couldn’t use Skype for the assignment, so Angie came to the rescue by setting up a meeting in Adobe Connect. Neither of us had created an Adobe Connect meeting before (only participated in them), so this was new territory for Angie. It went smoothly and we were shortly joined by Sharon, losing only about 20 minutes of our scheduled time. Angie recorded our meeting using Camtasia Studio and graciously uploaded them to YouTube for us.
There are a number of advantages to using Adobe Connect. Users can join and contribute in a number of ways (audio, video, chat window). It was also fairly easy to create the room (from what Angie told me) and connect with our group. We didn’t take advantage of the screen-share options embedded in the program, but they are there and could add an additional, effective element to a group meeting depending on the needs. I was recently in an Adobe Connect session that was part of the National Council of Teachers of English meeting. In that session there were two webcams going, a large number of chat window participants, and a slideshow via screen sharing. The whole thing went off without a hitch, so I know that the tool has more advantages than we were able to uncover in our short meeting (bandwidth, willing).
As for disadvantages, I noticed a few in our meeting and a few from the times I’ve used Adobe Connect in the past. There is a serious delay in typing and oftentimes in video conferencing. I have a lot of experience using Elluminate (now known as Blackboard Collaborative) and never had the same delays in typing. With Adobe Connect it seems to miss letters as you are typing, turning your chat window messages into some sort of mistaken text-speech. In my group meeting there was also a delay on my end. I was joining from a different country, which could have explained the issues. We had trouble with the delay on my end as I tried to have a normal conversation and ended up talking over Sharon and Angie. Eventually I resorted to just typing in the chat window to avoid the confusion.
I think Adobe Connect served us well as a conversation space about the project, but that Google Docs is an easier way to think through the details of the project (like dividing up work, storyboarding, etc.) in a timely manner. We used our meeting to brainstorm and now we’re using the Google Doc to simmer ideas. In the future I would prefer to use a Skype conference call since the connection seems to be more reliable with less delay, though since its acquisition by Microsoft, video conferencing with more than two people is a premium feature. We would have to conference with audio only.
Angie recorded our session using Camtasia and uploaded the meeting in three parts to YouTube. You can watch each part below.
