We had no hiccups from the bandwidth, no delays, or disconnects. There was an echo present for all of us to hear when each of us talked, but we figured it was also convenient in case you did not hear it right the first time! LOL! The video window was small but picture quality was good. All of our Power Points got loaded in a timely fashion and we were ready to present in a few minutes after connecting. I gave moderator privileges to Cara and Maureen and we were able to talk and access the screen controls simultaneously. This worked well because there were just three of us collaborating online. (Disclaimer: You would not do this as an instructor in a live online session full of students). Here is a snapshot of our WizIQ session. Cara and Maureen took one of their presentations after we had them uploaded.
Cara presented first and gave us screen shots of one of her online live class sessions. She uses a licensed application called In Sync? I enjoyed that she made her students present an activity to the other students in the class, giving them the experience of how to teach others using live video from your location. She also discussed the perils of live online classes and what you need to do from a support standpoint and remediation when students have technical problems. Plus we finally got to see the color coordinated and quite fashionable headsets!
Maureen shared with us some of her research using NetLogo's sheep population control application and how she thinks it will help her students. She investigated MIT and their Open Courseware offerings online. We had done some research also, and all of us were surprised at the lack of content. When you dig deeper into some of these open course links, you find course descriptions, or a couple of lectures posted for the subject. We understand what Dr. Bonk is trying to convey in Chapter 5: MIT in Every Home (Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare), but we also need to consider that these open courses, and their content offerings are at the mercy of the faculty member's personal decisions as to how much, or little, gets posted.
Because I spent some time reading Dr. Chen's Education Nation book for this class...my presentation covered http://www.edutopia.org and how they offer (besides a short video) the supporting information and documentation for these school success stories. The kind of information that school administrators and educators can study to better understand the effort that took place behind such favorable outcome. Open Culture is a "pop-culture flavored site"( http://www.openculture.com/category/education ) dedicated to offering content online linked to iTunes educational podcasts, and iTunes University. They have an iPhone application, and a channel of their most popular education-related videos in You Tube. I got sidetracked after this site with the iTunes (http://www.apple.com/iTunes) podcast content of TeachersTV (videos from the UK, and you can not stop watching these...), and iTunes University's participating institutions. I was impressed with the OER Commons site ( http://www.oercommons.org/ ) and their OER materials simple search. The PA Department of Education's SAS Portal, hopefully (fingers crossed) will achieve the level of content sharing found in this site. After looking into the Open Courseware Consortium site ( http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ ), I was a little disappointed with the content offered for Education and Technology. Maybe Lehigh University can join the OCW Consortium and make some contributions!!
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