Just finished my first session in my bigger room - I had 8 participants, four of whom were the same people who came last week, so were really seeing the same thing again. A couple of interesting things - one is that the number of people who are interested in this is quite a bit lower than I had hoped - only 8 out f 23 trainees - and (of course) the really weak trainees who need it most aren't coming. I guess that you can lead a horse to water.....
On a more technical note, although the voice option seems to work quite well with ConnectPro, it's interesting that most people don't seem to want to use it and are much more comfortable with the text chat option. This has the advantage that it's easy to get answers and feedback from a wider number of people, but it's less personal from my point of view. The new session went well, though - I estimated the amount of material much better and the visuals were good.
Another small technical hiccup is that when you put them into the breakout rooms, the powerpoint presentation in each room is on the first page (ie hasn't moved on.) Not sure if there is a way around this, but it'd be helpful if there were - I can't leave them with a quiz, because they're not on the right page.
Showing posts with label Using images. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Using images. Show all posts
Sunday, February 6, 2011
How to do it better...
I signed up to Adobe Connect yesterday, so now I have a room that I can fit 100 people in (wow!) at a cost of around £40 a month. I spoke on-line to the trainees in their input session, so now they all know what's available and we'll see how many turn up tonight at 8pm.
I've been thinking about the differences between this kind of on-line teaching and face to face classes (f2f). It is a different animal, and is going to require some different techniques, I think, or at least a rethinking of the emphasis of different things.
The main two differences (and they're related) are that you can't see the learners' body language, and that makes it more difficult to ask them questions and have any idea of whether or not you're going to embarrass them. In a class, you stand a good chance of knowing if they know.. not so, on line.
The other thing is similar, but related to the teacher, and is that it's easy in a class to create an atmosphere with your personality - you can sense the mood, run with it, and use your own energy to 'gee things up' where necessary. This isn't so easy on-line. I've been pondering how to help to inject more interest into the sessions (although, to be fair, the learners seem to like it so far, anyway). I've re-adjusted the parts of speech session so that it's got about half the content of the original, includes lots of images, cartoons, etc and has a 'quick quiz' slide after each new bit of input -four in all. Let's see how that goes....
I've been thinking about the differences between this kind of on-line teaching and face to face classes (f2f). It is a different animal, and is going to require some different techniques, I think, or at least a rethinking of the emphasis of different things.
The main two differences (and they're related) are that you can't see the learners' body language, and that makes it more difficult to ask them questions and have any idea of whether or not you're going to embarrass them. In a class, you stand a good chance of knowing if they know.. not so, on line.
The other thing is similar, but related to the teacher, and is that it's easy in a class to create an atmosphere with your personality - you can sense the mood, run with it, and use your own energy to 'gee things up' where necessary. This isn't so easy on-line. I've been pondering how to help to inject more interest into the sessions (although, to be fair, the learners seem to like it so far, anyway). I've re-adjusted the parts of speech session so that it's got about half the content of the original, includes lots of images, cartoons, etc and has a 'quick quiz' slide after each new bit of input -four in all. Let's see how that goes....
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