Answering questions in a VLE

Had a conversation today with the participants in the VLE about how they felt about answering questions in 'text chat' mode.  I can see that the advantage of this pedagogically is that more people get to answer, and it does help to show up any misunderstandings or misapprehensions that they are labouring under. On the other hand, it's more of a permenant record of a mistake and it's very public, so I wanted to know how people felt about this.  The people I asked acknowledged that this was true, but didn't find it too embarrassing.  Other things that were mentioned, however, were that :

• some people don't type fast, and so the touch typists have an advantage and that
• sometimes people don't know whether to type or talk. 

Re the second point, I think it is an idea to make this explicit and to 'train' people to understand that:

•  text chat works best as a whole group
• If you want to speak you should put up your hand or a confused icon etc
• When you're not speaking, you should turn off your mike -this is causing some problems in the breakout rooms with feedback.

What we did do today that was a great success was that the participants wrote on the whiteboard screen to provide answers and this worked very well, both in the breakout rooms and in the main room.

Feedback

Some useful feedback from Mike Carbarles

By the way I tried out the recording and noticed that when you go to breakout rooms, there's deadly silence. If you want to make this more marketable, I suggest you try leaving a few students in the main room for the recording.

Actually, I should appologize. When I opened my mic there was a lot of echo. That's because I was being lazy - using my laptop built in mic and speaker. so the sound was feeding back out of the built in speaker and into my built in mic. You should specify in the signup process that a headset with mic is absolutely necessary. Not only should it reduce background noise, but also eliminates the "talkback radio with the radio on" effect(which happened when I spoke).


Hope that is useful for future.

Using Voice and Timing

The session tonight was on the Present Perfect.  It's the first of the part II course lessons, ie the first time I've been explaining grammar rather than just explaining what things are called.  It was largely quite successful, but went on for much longer than I  had planned - about 90 mins, not 60.  I thin this was necessary, to be honest, I couldn't have done it justice in less, but I may have to rethink the times - maybe this part II has to have 90 minute sessions.

More trouble with the breakout rooms and the (not responding) signal.  I'll have to get on to Adobe again - this only seems to have happened since they changed the programme - I want the old one back!!

What was interesting tonight was that people were comfortable to use voice for the first time.  I had a lot more vocal feedback and much less text chat.  Not sure whether this is good or bad as it meant that some of the participants were less involved, but it made it feel more like an interactive classroom environment.  Not sure how this will work if the group is much bigger.....

Started to think about a website - I'll need one if this is going to be a commercial venture.  There's a lot of interest in the pilot course (it is free, though....) - I've had 15 people sign up in 2 days - what is really interesting is that they are not in any way all pre-celta trainees - a lot of them are post celta or qualified teachers in a job......  There may be a lot of mileage in this.

What happens when the technology doesn't work?

Tonight was really quite a frustration!  Adobe have updated the system (which, to be fair they did warn me they were going to do) and so the layout was a bit different, and took a bit of getting used to.  More concerning was that when I rtied to use the breakout rooms, the whole system seemed to freeze up - I kept getting a (not responding) title on the top of my screen.  Now whether this was due to the new system, or just the connection tonight, I'm not sure, but it was so frustrating.  I had to log out and log back in twice and then there is a lot of hassle in trying to ascertain whether or not people can hear you again, etc.  In the end, I decided not to bother with the breakout rooms and just to use the whole room scenario.  This was a shame, though.  The metality seems to be that people don't want to use voice in the main room and are happier to text chat, but will use voice in the breakout rooms. Snce using voice makes the whole expereince so much richer and more immediate, I'll have to hope that we can fix the problems with the breakout rooms......

Onward ever onward...

Just finished a session - 9 people came and it's getting easier.  Made much more use of the breakout rooms tonight and this worked well, especially for those who had microphones - I think I'm going to encourage people more strongly to get microphones, because it's a much richer experience for all if you can use voice.  Discovered that the participants can move the slide show on themselves when they are in the breakout groups, so that was a bit of a revelation, and made managing them much easier.  I asked the learners about the breakouts and they were very positive about them - said that they gave them time to think.

In terms of the material, had a bit of a re-think about what is important to teach them.  Things do go slower in  on-line teaching, and I think I am being drawn into too much detail (especially with pronouns.....) I need to pare it back a bit and keep up the levels of practice.

Voice or Chat?

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.

Adobe Connect and keeping it simple

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......