Monday, June 7, 2010
Week 1 Wimba Session 1
After watching the archived Wimba session, I was pleased to find out that there were a lot of visuals which will help me stay engaged during the session. I am shy about participating in Wimbas, I don't want to force people that I don't know to listen to me if they don't want to (and I sometimes get frustrated with the same people who just talk, talk, talk, then ask questions that are clearly answered in the syllabus or in other places in FSO - I don't talk in Wimbas because I assume that other people would be annoyed by me) but this Wimba was pretty useful. This class seems a little overwhelming to me right now, and a lot more academic, which is good but will be an interesting change. The information in this course really interests me since I have just started a new job as a technology enrichment teacher in which all of our course curriculum is online via a wiki. Since I will be working with sixth graders, the wiki seems a little too advanced for them (I believe it was designed for high schoolers) so I am interested in how I can organize the course for them in such a way that they will get the most out of it. I have been told that the previous class did not get much done and I want to break down the content for my students into manageable pieces so they can work at their own pace and accomplish their goals. I am a little apprehensive about my lit review, but I am on summer vacation and even though I am teaching summer school, it is only half a day and I will have afternoons to work. I liked the term "fail forward" - kind of like learning from your mistakes, I guess. OK, I am going to try not to procrastinate as much in this course, since it seems as though the course was not designed with procrastinators in mind. I better get to work!
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Hello! I found your posting as it was featured on Wimba's Facebook page today. I'm in IT training in higher ed and we use Wimba as well. You touched on some good points about the Wimba mechanism, it is the interactivity that engages folks and keeps them interested. Wimba gives multiple opportunites for that through yes/no checks, hand raising, white board interaction and question prompts.
ReplyDeleteDon't feel shy about participating at all as you are paying for your time and not theirs. More than likely, they would benefit from exposure to your questions and the perspective and be inclined to participate more themselves.
On a side note about wikis, one "gotcha" that can bite you on a class project is that if everyone is expected to edit the same page, you can run into problems (depending on the wiki) as editing the page locks the page from all other users at that time from editing, so you may want to consider spreading out the workload over a few pages so folks can have more of a chance to get their work done. Good luck!
-Billy