ISTE Workshop: A Novel Hour
I began ISTE on Sunday teaching a 3-hour workshop on our “Novel in an Hour” project. Christina and Rich Hum from Kigluait Educational Adventures in Talkeetna, Alaska co-taught the session with me.
The goals of the session were for participants to experience Skype and H.323 video conferencing and learn how to use a wiki and Glogster. I designed it to be hands-on from the beginning with about half of the time for learning the technology and the second half applying the technologies within the novel in an hour format. This would have worked perfectly….in a 6 hour workshop format! Here is a link to the workshop wiki.
I love the Plus/Delta format and am going to analyze the workshop through that lens.
Plus (+)
- Two screens was wonderful. Had Polycom connection on one and desktop showing on the other.
- Pre-workshop survey to help understand the needs of participants.
- Workshop wiki to organize information by co-teachers for participants. (This also worked for Rich to see what our participants were creating.)
- The assessment piece! (Even though we did not get to it, we had a rubric to assess the presentations and other creations by the participants and a post-workshop survey to gauge their learning.)
- Hands-on with laptops.
- Co-teaching with Christina and Rich! That gives such pop to use the video conferencing technology to span the distance and show participants the power of connecting with experts.
- The video conference connections were beautiful!
- Pass out the bookmarks and let people know about additional learning opportunities related to video conferencing throughout the conference.
Delta (Δ)
- Skype did not work. Could not connect or accept contacts. Could not chat. Would work via the app on the iPhone. It was weird and quite frustrating. Shane and Paul tested the network and for a while we thought it was that funky bug back when 4.0 first came out and you have to share contacts with the 3.8 software. Ultimately, we think it was bandwidth because four ladies who stayed after finally got it working.
- Make this a 6 hour session. 75% of the participants were new or newish to many of the technologies and we needed all morning to tinker with them before hitting the application of the technologies into the novel in an hour format.
- Switch the screens. Put the Polycom screen closest to the camera so that when they are working with the remote, they will be able to look at the remote site without looking across the room.
- Need to completely test ALL technologies. We lost a lot of time tinkering with Skype. The positive is that we modeled problem-solving in the context of learning new technologies.
Questions
- Can you change a regular Glogster account into an edu? Or do you have to make another account?
- Why could we not get Skype to work? I want to agree it was bandwidth, but I was able to connect just fine with everyone that I already had in my contact list. It was such a mystery.
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