Hosting the Perfect Webinar (Part 1: Technology)

As part of the Applied Practice in Blended and Online Education module I will be presenting an expert session on mobile learning. This will be hosting within Napier's Blackboard Collaborate environment which I have used in the past as a student but never as the host of an event. Unfortunately my own university does not have any kind of webinar platform at the moment so I decided I better take a look at the available options if I am to host further webinars in my own teaching.

We have a very small budget for this kind of thing so I decided to begin by experimenting with free services. As part of my mentoring with fellow geekucator Nicky I decided to give google + hangouts a try. google + hangouts is a free platform for hosting online meetings with up to 10 participants. Unfortunately for whatever reason I could only see a white screen beside the chat window and Nicky could not hear or see me. We therefore had to check out some of the alternatives.

A search for free webinar services brings back a huge amount of results. Some services are financed by advertising, others offer limited free services with additional features available at a price (freemium), and others have very tight restrictions on the number of participants - in one case it was a site offering the chance to host a webinar with only one participant!

After technical problems with another couple of sites we finally had success with liveminutes which offers free webinars for up to 20 participants. I had to create an account on the site which took about a minute and then we were up a running. The site produces a link which you can send to participants or you can email invitations directly. The tool seems to include all the standard webinar features such as a whiteboard, audio and video chat, and uploading of files. What didn't immediately seem to be obvious were interactive features likes polls or questions. I will have to investigate the site a bit further to find out if these features are available. This is something I definitely want to use in my expert session because without any audience participation I think a 60 minute webinar could feel very long indeed - for both the participants AND the presenter. The techniques and content I decide to use will be the subject of my next blog.

I do want to mention a couple of features of liveminutes that I did especially like - as I have little experience of webinar software I don't know if other programmes offer these too. I received an automatic email message from liveminutes reminding me to close my meeting because I hadn't done it properly. On closing the meeting there was also an option to have all of the notes produced during the meeting saved automatically into a pdf file. This is an excellent (and low effort) way to make sure everyone has all of the details from a meeting and doesn't have to take notes themselves. It is perhaps not quite the full recording facility that I know some webinar platforms offer but at this price ($0) I can live with that.

Finally, I should mention an excellent website that I visited again whilst trying to find free webinar tools. Richard Byrne's award winning blog, freetech4teachers.com, has links to a lot of free software as well as articles and reviews. It should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in this area.

Now I am going to get busy deciding how to avoid "death by Powerpoint" - the answers will (hopefully) be revealed in my next post.

Neil

How to Create Podcasts for Education

Now that I have shelved the podcasting idea for my current BOE module the first of the books I ordered on the subject has arrived. "How to create podcasts for education" by Gilly Salmon et all is a thin, pamphlet-style book published by Open University Press/Society for Research in Higher Education in 2008. This seems to be a very practical, hands-on guide to podcasts which, at only 29 pages, should be a very quick read and jumpstart into the subject.

Despite now not using podcasts for my studies I do still intend to use them in the coming semester with my students of Technical English. This book will hopefully cover the technical side of things and when my next order arrives soon I will learn more about the pedagogical aspects of podcasting. My plan so far is to produce at least one podcast for each chapter of the book we work through. A large part of each unit is a reading comprehension so I hope that if the text is also made available as an audio file it may help students who are more auditive learners. It certainly also shouldn't hurt their pronunciation skills when they hear a native speaker reading it for them.

Here's hoping the students actually make use of this possibility.

Neil

Focus found, lost and found again!

A week is a long time in politics and a day is a long time in Applied Practice in Blended and Online Teaching. Having had a set-back with my original focus idea this week, I was pleased to decide on a mobile learning expert session and podcasting as the focus for this module. I had already ordered two books of podcasting from Amazon and then in the virtual office hours that same day my discussion with Keith took a different turn and we decided that I should take mentoring as my second focus rather than podcasting. The logic behind this was to keep everything focussing around one area. At first glance mentoring may not seem to have anything in particular to do with mobile learning but in this case I will be mentoring fellow-student Nicky who is currently working through the Customised Study module with her focus on, guess what... mobile learning! My focus for this module is now therefore presenting an expert session on mobile learning whilst simultaneously mentoring a student investigating the same area. It seems like a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and refresh and deepen my knowledge of mentoring.

In a previous job I did a training course on coaching which I thought might be similar to mentoring. In actual fact a quick search of the internet tells me that experts consider coaching and mentoring to be two different things so before I go any further I think a definition is in order. Becky Wai-Packard of Mount Holyoak College shares a definition of mentoring as:

"a relationship between a less experienced individual, called a mentee or protégé, and a more experienced individual known as a mentor... that fosters the mentee’s professional, academic, or personal development (Donaldson, Ensher, & Grant-Vallone, 2000)"

In order to perform successful mentoring some structure is required. Nicky and I have had a first meeting in which we discussed this structure and agreed that we would write a mentoring contract in which both of us clearly state what we expect from the mentoring relationship and what we commit ourselves to contribute. Our first commitment is an agreement to meet online at least once a week with meetings taking place every Friday. Our first meeting this week used Skype but in future we want to use google hangouts which offers the ability to share documents and desktops which might make the mentoring process even more rewarding. As a theoretical basis for the mentoring Keith suggested the GROW model which I am now going to use. GROW is an acronym for Goal - Current Reality - Options - Will (MindTools, undated) which describes the four main steps the mentoring process should go through. As I continue my research and active mentoring it may be that other tools also become relevant and I will explore as many of them as time allows.

For the moment I now need to get my Learning Agreement submitted, work on the mentoring agreement for Nicky and start working on my expert session. I can already tell that the next few weeks are going to be busy but also very interesting.

http://ehrweb.aaas.org/sciMentoring/Mentor_Definitions_Packard.pdf [accessed 18.2.2012]

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_89.htm [accessed 18.2.2012]

Finding a focus

Today is the submission day for our APBOT learning agreements and unfortunately I have had a small problem finding a focus. I read recently that online moderators were needed for the annual conference of IATEFL (the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) so sent an email to the organizers offering my services. The role involved moderating discussions and presentations and generally keeping people not physically at the conference involved and up-to-date. Sadly my initial email application must have got lost because I got no reply. I sent a second mail only to be informed that they now had enough people but that I was first reserve. This message came through just a couple of days ago so it has not given me much time to think of an alternative. Waiting to see if I do actually get called up at the last minute is not really compatible with using this experience for my module.

There may however now be a light at the end of the tunnel. As luck would have it my classmate Nicky from the University of Westminster is involved in a new JISC project on m-learning which I may be able to make a contribution to as a guest speaker. M-learning was the subject of my previous project in the module Customised Study for Blended and Online Education so I have some ideas about what is going on in that area as well as data about my own students' attitudes and opinions on m-learning. This all still has to be claried with both Westminster and my tutor at Napier but if it all works out I will be using that as the "Practical Student Support Activity" part of my project. Supporting my own students is not really possible at the moment because they now have their semester break and won't be back until the beginning of April.

The other part of this module is an optional "Developmental Element". As I am always very keen to play around with new software this could be a good chance to play around with some programs I have recently found; Snap!, Snap! Empower and GLOmaker2. I might even produce a series of podcasts for my main course next semester, Professional English: Engineering. Luckily my tutor is aware of the above problems but it would still be nice to submit a rough outline today to at least have something to discuss.

Let's wait and see how the rest of the day goes and whether I am actually able to find a focus.

Neil

The tablet has landed!

Finally, almost three months after starting to blog about Tablet Teaching, I have now invested in my own tablet computer. I did actually have a tablet once before, an Archos 7 Home Tablet, but it didn't impress so I returned it to Amazon after about a week. Now I am the proud owner of an HTC Flyer which so far is making an excellent impression. The HTC Flyer doesn't seem to be the best known tablet but for me there were several reasons for making this choice. Firstly, an iPad is too expensive and for my taste a little bit too big as well. The HTC has a 7" screen which I find a nice size and it also has a stylus which you can use for all kinds of programs. If everything works out well I will also use my Flyer to replace my Kindle and thanks to the HDMI ouput will also be exploring using the tablet to give presentations. As I try out more and more m-learning software and discover new ways to use this tablet in class I will keep you all posted.

The second big news today is that I will now be using this blog as my virtual diary for the module "Applied Practice in Blended and Online Education" - part of my MSc course in Blended and Online Education which I am taking at Edinburgh Napier University. Each week I will post an official APBOT entry which will ultimately go towards making a patchwork text at the end of the trimester. As far as possible I will of course also post less serious entries as time allows.

That's all for now!

Neil