Bring it on

Tomorrow is our first professional development session for this learnscope project. We are holding it at the technology school of the future. (this enables all participants to see and feel technology in action).

Part of our learnscope project is to use a blended learning environment to expose participants to an e-environment as students; and to expose the facilitators to an e-environment as a teacher. Needless to say I have been busy doing all sorts of things such as:

• Registering another vetsa classroom ( I thought that this would be just a matter of course since I already am running one classroom thru that site - not so)
• Planning teaching and learning materials.
• Developing the classroom - believe it or not I forgot how to put links up, rss feeds, calendar dates etc.(So I had to familiarise myself with these things again).
• Just like anything - if you dont use it -you loose it.

Anyway - heres hoping tomorrow goes well. I'll put up another post later this week outlining my experience of that session.

Lud

The classroom is called 'finding new ways to shine' on the vetsa website ( www.vetsa.net.au ) if anyone wants to have a look.

Elluminate conference

I am overwhelmed! I attended the tapping into social networks for e learning and wow. I really didnt want to attend this. I thought that my skills would make me look silly. That I wouldnt get anythng from the conference! That it would be a waste of my time.
HOW WRONG CAN I BE??????

Regardless of the speakers (just like any other classroom/conference - some are engaging and others arent) I now have so many ideas to look at for fyrther development. My only other exposure to elluminate was not a positive one so I shelved it as something I might be interested in as a teacher. Well now .........

Learning more about elluminate and how to use it may end up being a priority for our learnscope project even though it is not even scheduled and in our plan. Talk about being flexible.
From here I guess I will talk to the rest of the team, try and get them to feel some of the magic that I do and see if they are interested in seeing a demo.

Here are the componants that made me feel so positive :

• The visuals - the screen was very easy to figure out.
• The names of all participants clearly displayed
• The ease of chat at the same time as listening an/or watching (so often at conferences I wanted to say something but cultuarally this is a no no at a conference)
• The clear sound and ease of mic control/use
• The whiteboard
• the ability to use break out rooms
• The ease of coming and going/getting a coffee/listening without needing to sit still.
• The instant feedback from moderators etc etc.

We have our first professional development workshop comiong up in 10 days. I cant wait even though it doesnt include elluminate - I can now see a clear link between ALL that we are learning and how that might feed into a virtual classroom like elluminate.

Just what we need if we are going to reach our remote but motivated workers.

Lud