Reflecting on the 'Who', 'What' and 'Why' of Online Facilitation

My blog title was the focus of this past week in the Facilitating Online course (FO2010). For a look at the resources we were asked to read/view this week check out this post on the class blog.

Community, networks, and what sits in between

I found the Nancy White video on Community, networks, and what sits in between very interesting. She distinguished between communities, which take time to build and nurture, where people (hopefully) make strong ties to each other to networks which tend to involve looser ties, people drop in and out, and they overlap with other networks. She maintains that the area in between the two is an area of real interest. I hope to learn more about this when she presents in the class Elluminate session next week (open to non-class participants too!) After watching Nancy's video I realized that I have created an online learning network for myself, but many of the online communities I have joined have fizzled or I have dropped out of them. I think it is definitely more work to create, maintain, and participate in an online community.

Working effectively in a virtual team

This past week's Elluminate session featured Terry Neal who spoke on Facilitating virtual teams. Before the session we were asked to read the paper she co-authored with Dr. Clare Atkins, Working effectively in a virtual team. Both the paper and the presentation highlighted a few key things for me:

1. to be effective, roles and responsibilities need to be clearly laid out
2. it helped to start off the team work with some face-to-face meetings
3. ensure that you use a variety of means to communicate; text (e-mail, Google groups or other discussion fora, blogs), audio (telephone, Skype) and visual (Skype, Elluminate).

This past year I have had experience with the difficulties when point number 1 is overlooked. It can be frustrating working in a virtual team when the roles and responsibilities are not clear. Work can be duplicated, feelings can be hurt. It only makes sense to spell things out. It doesn't mean that there can't be any flexibility, but it at least gives everyone a starting point.

Point number two just makes sense. It is so much easier to make a connection with someone if you've been able to meet them face-to-face. Then when you are communicating with them in the more limited (fewer dimensions) on-line environment you can relate them back to the real person.

Terry's presentation was the first one that involved volunteer facilitators from the class. Chris and Jillian stepped up to the plate and did a great job. They had spent some time before in Elluminate working with the moderator tools. They had clearly discussed with each other what their roles were going to be and they did a good job of dealing with issues and keeping the session moving along.

Synthesis

This week I've realized that I would like to make a number of changes to what I do. When I connect with my high school distributed learning students, most of whom learn asynchronously, I need to provide multiple ways to interact meaningfully. I current use e-mail, text messaging in Moodle (our Learning Management System) phone conversations, Elluminate, and face-to-face but I really need to step things up a notch with Elluminate and my face-to-face interactions.

Elluminate has been a struggle--with a small number of asynchronous students in the 13 plus courses that I am responsible for it has been challenging to come up with meaningful meetings. Every student is in a different place so offering lessons is difficult; who do you target? I have tried tutorials too, but because my students aren't part of a strong community it is a big risk to go online and say "I don't get this, please explain it to me." (The community aspect is a whole other post--so I'll leave that for now.)

"hang the blessed DJ..." (again) by streetpreacher83 (Photo License)

Math DJ

So this is my recent brainstorm. My Elluminate sessions are going to allow me to be a math DJ . I will ask students to send me the questions they would like me to explain at least one hour prior to the session. When the session starts I will record it, but also see if I can stream it to UStream or a similar service so that students can observe without having to log in to Elluminate (they choose their level of interaction.) If students log into Elluminate, I will play their requests first (thus the DJ part of Math DJ), with the requests from students who aren't logged on going to the end of the queue. My hope is that students will get the math help they need, they will get it conveniently online, but there is a way to reduce the risk of putting yourself out there. Hopefully many students will become more comfortable with the technology and up their participation. Now I just need to find some good intro and outro music...

F2F

Face-to-face (F2F) group meetings have been difficult for many of the reasons I cited with Elluminate. In the past my colleague and I have offered a drop in tutorial session where we occasionally have small group lessons on core course ideas (eg grammar for Language Arts students, writing up and carrying out labs for Science students). It has not been particularly effective for a number of reasons; one of which is that it is optional for some students and mandatory for many students who are behind and/or have behavioural issues. This is not a good mix. This year I would like to separate the groups. The students who have an agreement that they must work x amount of hours in our building will be there at a different time from the drop in tutorial session (unless it is their choice to attend the tutorial). Hopefully students who attend the drop in tutorial are they because they (or their parent!) want to be there and they know that they will get help (and not have to wait for the teachers to deal with those students who do not want to be there).

Gym by I like. (Photo License)

Math Gym

In addition I would like to offer some stand alone face-to-face sessions called Math Gyms to engage students in basic problem solving in Math. I'd like to draw on some of the activities that Dan Meyer writes about in his What Can You Do With This? blog posts. The Math Gym would be multi-age and it would not cover specific aspects of the different Math curricula--but it would be an opportunity for students to work together on problem solving. Work on their Math muscles as it were.

The Wrap Up

Last week was a good week in FO2010 land. I've absorbed a lot and I think I can start to integrate this learning into my practice. If you have any suggestions on how to improve Elluminate and/or F2F sessions with asynchronous learners please let me know. My school year starts at the beginning of September so now is my time to plan so that I can hit the ground/internet running :-)

How I Use iGoogle

Earlier this week in the Facilitating Online 2010 course Sarah Stewart talked about how she uses her iGoogle page to stay organized and up to date on new posts from the FO2010 crew. She also asked if any of the participants used iGoogle and if we could share how we use it.

I created the following video on how I use iGoogle using Screenr and then published it to my YouTube channel. Here's the link to the video in case it is not showing up for you. I use iGoogle a lot. It is my own personal dashboard. I hope you get a sense of how useful I find it from my short (2:16) video.

This is my first time using Screenr. So far I have been pleased with it. It was easy to set up and easy to use. I haven't done a lot of screencasts before, but I liked using Screenr better than Jing (though Jing allows for screenshots, while Screenr does not). That's one thing I enjoy about taking a course like this; it encourages me to stretch my thinking and to try out new tools.

The Wrap Up

Do you use iGoogle? What are some of the differences in the way you use it? If you don't use iGoogle (or a similar tool) please feel free to ask questions about it in the comments.

Cheers!

Plan for FO2010

Brainstorming

To help me think about what I want to get out of Facilitating Online 2010 (FO2010), I created the following mind map in bubbl.us The map is quite large so you will have to drag with your mouse to see all of the map. Here's the link to the map if it is not showing up below.

This is the first time that I have used an online mind mapping tool. I was inspired by the mindmeister mindmap on Online Communities that Sarah Stewart tweeted about last week. I decided to try bubbl.us after polling my twitter network (thanks network!)

The Task This Week in FO2010

For this week Sarah has asked us to make a plan for what we want to learn and explore. Here are the four questions that we've been asked to answer:

1. What do you want to learn to facilitate? Online professional development for teachers. I'd like to work on a model for professional development in my school district that fosters ongoing professional development. I see this as involving a face-to-face component as well as synchronous online meetings using Elluminate and possibly Moodle as a place to archive and collaborate on learning. (Thinking Moodle because would like to see more teachers in my district using it, but am also aware that a more open environment can result in even more amazing connections and learning.) One possible format would be 'Tech Tuesdays' style 20-30 minute weekly Elluminate Live meetings on a specific topic. Another possible format is LAN parties as outlined by North Vancouver's Bryan Hughes.
2. What are you doing now in terms of online facilitation? I'm a distributed learning teacher with the majority of my courses being online in Moodle. I offer my students weekly Elluminate tutorials (these are poorly attended and an area in which I am trying to improve.) I have volunteered as an assistant facilitator with Know Weeks and CEET. Both organizations offer(ed) week long online courses geared towards K-12 educators in British Columbia, Canada. Both Know Weeks and CEET used Moodle.
3. What would you like to achieve, change, or do more of? I would like to improve student participation and engagement in my Elluminate tutorials. I would like to initiate online professional development in my school district.
4. What do you need to do or make happen to acheive your goal? I need to practice facilitating in a safe environment before attempting to promote and facilitate an online professional development session on my own.

Feedback

Have you facilitated your own online events before? What advice would you offer to someone who is planning to offer their first online event? Are there some definite dos and don'ts?

As always, thanks for taking the time to read what I've written :-)

Google Map Mashup for FO2010

For those in the Facilitating Online 2010 course, Chris Woodhouse tweeted

shed53: #FO2010 Never done any mashups but wonder if anyone fancies a map with all the students' locations pinned. Course poster?

So...

Here's the link to a map where we can add markers indicating our locations. Check out the video near the end of this post to see how to do this.

View FO2010 in a larger map

I'd recommend placing your marker in a general spot, like 'Vancouver' as opposed to a specific address like '3614 West 16th Ave, Vancouver'. I had seen this done before when I (briefly) participated in CCK08. Rod Lucier created a similar map and posted on how to add your marker to the map. I've included his video here. If you follow his instructions it will work on our FO2010 map.

Cheers!

Welcome To My New Digs!

Welcome to Hemel by Mr Ush. Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works License

Thanks for stopping by! I've recently moved my blog from Edublogs to here. You can see this post for the reasons for my move. Moving all of my posts and their related comments was relatively easy. The Wordpress2Blogger site has instructions and a converter. It talks about WXR files, but I found that it was able to deal with the Wordpress XML file that I exported from Edublogs. However, any links I had to my own posts appear to be a little messed up. I'm also getting some weird text showing up with many of my images. So it is a slow process right now as I go through all my posts and fix these issues.

If you've moved your blog before, why did you do it and how did the process go? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your current blogging platform?

Moving Day?

On Cleaning House and Blog Sabbaticals

Moving Day by Joe_Andrews. Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works Licence

Well, I've been thinking about it for awhile. I'm going on a bit of a blog sabbatical. I know, I know, it's alright if you thought I was already on a blog sabbatical. After all, it is not like I've been posting up a storm. So let me clarify. I'm not ceasing to blog. I'm just going somewhere else to do it. For awhile at least.

Some Background

When I started blogging back in November of 2007, I started out at Blogspot. Two months later I made the switch to Edublogs. It seemed like that was where all the cool kids were ;-) The blogs were more customizable (you could have pages and tabs at the top of your blogs!) There was a big community. And lots and lots of other good reasons. (Unfortunately when I made the switch I deleted my original blog and didn't save all of the posts. So my very first 'Hello World!' post is gone.)

Why Go Back?

The Ads: When Edublogs started embedding ads in the free blogs I was ok with it--after all I had won Edublogs credits in the 31 Day Comment Challenge and used them to upgrade to a supporter blog, so no ads for me! When my year ran out and I was too cheap to renew I got to experience the joys of ads ads everywhere. First is was links in posts, then banner ads at the top of posts. Particulary irksome is the ad linked to my blog's byline. As I do not administer student blogs, just this little ole blog, it didn't make sense to me to shell out for a premium blog. I tolerated the ads, but kept wondering if I should move to a new home? Perhaps even host my own blog?

Google Goodness: A lot of the blogs that I have been reading recently are Blogspot blogs. I also have a couple of Blogspot blogs that I use for other reasons, and Blogspot has steadily improved over the years. In addition, when I looked into hosting my own blog I got a little overwhelmed (yes, I know that it costs $$ to host your own, but my husband has webspace where I would have hosted it.)

Is It For Good?

I don't really know. I just know that I need to make a change. Starting the Facilitating Online 2010 course has also provided some impetus to clean house. I'll go on this little sabbatical, and perhaps come back with a renewed enthusiasm for all that Edublogs has to offer.

The Wrap Up

Have you made a blog move (or thought about one)? How did it go or what is holding you back?

And finally... please check me out in my sabbatical home!

E-mail is so Old School

And Landlines Too

A common theme in this blog is communication. It is key to so many elements of my job as a DL (distributed learning) teacher.

E-mail

Lately I'm finding it is harder to get in touch with my students. E-mail is so oldschool for them. Students may have their own e-mail address, but often only check it once a week. I wonder if most high schoolers rely on messaging in Facebook as opposed to e-mail? That seems to be the way many of my friends 'e-mail' these days.

Landline

Phoning isn't the old standby it used to be either. It seems that for a lot of families the landline is the number they give the school, but in reality they don't use it much as each member of the family has their own cell. Once you track down the right person's cell number you might be ok. The students, though, they aren't so keen on voice calls. Instead they're all about texting.

These changes have really only come about in a big way in the past year.

Texting

So when my colleague suggested that we needed district issued cell phones for texting our students, I laughed at first and then realized that she was probably onto something! I don't use my person cell that much (and only learned how to text a few months ago--yes I'm a cell phone ludite) so I have a very limited plan. And I'm not keen on giving out my personal number to my students. Come to think of it, they're probably not that keen on giving out their cell number to their teacher!

Question Time

Do you text your students? If so, how have you set this up so that proper boundaries are set, both for them and for you? If you have students at a distance, how else do you keep in contact?

As always, thanks for reading what I write.

Photo Credits
All images in this post are have Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Licenses.

e-mail screenshot by mwoodard
Tyneham - old telephone by Whipper snapper
Stop texting & watch the game by Lorainne DeSabato