Tried this out last night. I think it's going to be my vehicle of choice. It only needs Flash Player, which apparently is pretty universal and only has one version, and the interface is nice. You can use Powerpoint and the animations work and there is the possibility of breakout rooms. Having said that, I tried to use this facility last night and it seemed to result in the screen going blank and all of the learners losing sound and vision! I thinkmore practice is needed with the software, preferably in a room where we can all see each other and play around with it a bit.
Adobe is better with voice, too. I only had 3 people there, so I gave them all microphone rights and they can just press 'talk' when they want to put their microphones on (thus avoiding all of the feedback issues I had with Elluminate (which were probably my fault...) Interestingly, though, they weren't all that keen on using the voice option and still prefered the 'chat' option often. Not sure why - I'll have to ask them. There is a bit of a delay with the voice communication, it's not as easy as speaking on the phone, for example, and it wasn't all that easy to hear all of the participants. All bugs to iron out, I'm sure.
The other thing is simply that I'm still, despite paring back this session, putting in too much. This isn't about the on-line part of it, I don't think, but just about what they do and don't know. I HAVE to go back much more to basics - I tried to look at overall meanings of the perfect and continuous forms, but this was too much - I'm going to re-plan it looking just at the form. It's hard, as always, with this kind of stuff, to see it from the trainees' point of view. The nomenclature of the verb system seems so straightforward to me, but it really isn't to them.
Onwards and upwards......
No comments:
Post a Comment