We sold out. All 25 computer slots in iEARN’s Elluminate classroom were spoken for, a week or two before my January 19 webinar was held. Clearly teachers want to know more about how to incorporate multimedia in their classrooms. (My topic was Digital Storytelling: It All Begins with a Story.) Our marketing got three other things right too:
1) We made the lecture part of iEARN-Pakistan’s five-day, Train-the-Trainers workshop, which was sponsored by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Arts. That guaranteed an audience and gave me a focus.
2) We opened the webinar to all members of the iEARN network, which consists of K-12 teachers from about 130 countries. Because the webinar was sponsored, these members could attend for free.
3) We organized the webinar so the time would be convenient for the Eastern Hemisphere–we opened the virtual classroom at 2:30 pm in Karachi, and the lecture began at 3 pm. This brought in teachers from Russia (Siberia), Bahrain and Senegal, but to our surprise, we were also joined by teachers in Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States. We even had a valiant spirit from Tennessee, where the session may have began at 4 am central time.
In another first, we included a case study by Lynn de Araujo in Miami, who had just recently taught digital storytelling to her third-graders for their folktales unit.
In total, we were 45 participants who gathered for the 1.5 hour session. The majority of the participants were the 34 teacher-trainers at the workshop from all over Pakistan, including trainers from the Baluchistan region near the Afghanistan border, and one trainer from the UAE.
To be up in the cloud, interacting with people from so many places, with so many different experiences, felt like flying on a magic carpet. Lynn told me she felt the same. It was real magic. It was one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had in iEARN.
Problems that Need Solving
The evaluations are still coming in, but we really need to figure out how to show the lecturer talking as well as the Powerpoint in the Elluminate software. The trouble was, when I turned on my video window, people saw the top of my head and my eyes looking down at the screen. If I tilted my monitor, you could see my whole face but I couldn’t see the chat window where people were typing questions and answers, and I couldn’t see the button to click the audio on and off. (Note: if you leave the audio on and someone else tries to talk, you get a lot of static.)
The evaluations are still coming in, but we really need to figure out how to show the lecturer talking as well as the Powerpoint in the Elluminate software. The trouble was, when I turned on my video window, people saw the top of my head and my eyes looking down at the screen. If I tilted my monitor, you could see my whole face but I couldn’t see the chat window where people were typing questions and answers, and I couldn’t see the button to click the audio on and off. (Note: if you leave the audio on and someone else tries to talk, you get a lot of static.)
I asked at the Apple Store in Clarendon, where I live, whether there was a web cam that I could buy which would be in a different part of the screen. They showed me how Mac software converts the top-of-the-screen web cam angle so it looks like you are looking directly into the screen. I’m going to study Mac’s iChat theater and see if it would work better than Elluminate.
We also need to figure out how to show videos. I had five! The problem is that even if you have them in low-res YouTube, like I did, you have to wait for everyone to stream the video on their own computer. And many of these computers are old and the bandwidth is very slow. I asked participants to click on the raise-your-hand button when they finished watching, but I don’t think some of the people knew how to do that. As a result, we waited and waited for some people to put their hands up, and some never did. I never could figure out, even though I asked, whether they didn’t see any of the video or if they wanted to know how to raise their hand.
Since my gig is all about making videos, it’s essential that people be able to watch examples of what I’m talking about.
Maybe the solution is to spend the first 10 minutes having everyone open a browser window with the URL for each video, but not watch any of them until I come to that part in the lecture.
I’m encouraged though, by the excitement when people from so many places gather together to learn. I am hoping that the teachers were encouraged to have their students make video stories and partner other classrooms to show the best of these stories. This is a powerful next step to enable people who might never be able to afford to travel to have a real-time, real-life crossroads experience.
Thanks
Credit for the webinar goes to Diane Midness, iEARN-USA director of professional development workshops, Farah Kamal, iEARN-Pakistan and Alema Yousif, Adobe-iEARN Youth Voices coordinator for Pakistan. I also appreciate Lynn de Araujo and all of the talking and practicing that we did together before the webinar. Lynn says that we need to take our show on the road.
Credit for the webinar goes to Diane Midness, iEARN-USA director of professional development workshops, Farah Kamal, iEARN-Pakistan and Alema Yousif, Adobe-iEARN Youth Voices coordinator for Pakistan. I also appreciate Lynn de Araujo and all of the talking and practicing that we did together before the webinar. Lynn says that we need to take our show on the road.
I’m ready.
