Whew … what a week. Between coaching each night, doing daddy duty, and getting midterm grades done, I was not able to attend a live webcast at EdTechTalk, as assigned. I have my sights set on the EdTechWeekly webcast this Sunday at 7 p.m., so that I can experience one of these shows real-time. I’ll post another blog post about the experience Sunday night.
I also explored a few of the recorded shows this week, including Seedlings and Teachers Teaching Teachers. The show I listened to in its entirety, and enjoyed the most, was the K12 Virtual LAN Party. The show is described at EdTechTalk.com as follows: “Kathy Cassidy is a grade one teacher at Westmount School in Moose Jaw, SK, Canada. In the winter of 2008, Patrick Lewis’s university class of pre-service teachers were blogging mentors for Kathy’s grade one students. This presentation talks about that collaboration and the results of the research that was conducted about the effect this mentorship had on the students’ writing.”
The strengths of the show format were that the facilitators switched back and forth between text chat, a prepared video (that was well done) about the student-to-student blogging buddy project, and the Skype audio of the show’s facilitators and guests. The combination of Skype and text chat allowed for more participants, and modes of participation. Also, the text chat provided backup for when the video had a glich in it that required re-cueing.
The weakness of the format was that a viewer could not see the hosts and guests, other than when they appeared in the video. It would have been better to see those who were speaking instead of just the text chat, but that’s the nature of the virtual LAN party.
This show was very interesting. I would participate in future shows of this nature, especially if it meant learning more about ideas like Kathy Cassidy’s, which could have similar applications in my classes. Any new ideas, and the chance to discuss them with their creators, would be great.
This type of webcast, specifically the virtual LAN party, would require some skills and software to pull off, but I could see it working well to connect students in distant classrooms (on similar or same time zones) with other students or mentors, like the blogging in Cassidy’s project allowed. It could also be used to connect students in multiple classrooms with expert guests who were willing to participate.
I could see this working to connect my classroom with classrooms of former co-workers at my past school. I do a lot of career research, and my former school was a technical high school, so my current students could be connected with either past students or students who now attend my former school. Current students could discuss the careers that they are interested in and the tech school students could share some of their experiences studying and practicing in those fields.
