Elluminate and New South Wales (Oz State) April 12, 2008
Posted by Steve in CSTA, Elearning, Web2.0.Tags: elluminate, hz08, webcollaboration
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The Computing Studies Teachers Association (CSTA) is preparing to run their Inservice on May 19th. The inservice consists of several workshops that run concurrently and participants choose which workshop they will attend. One of the workshops will be on Elluminate, web collaboration software.
The inservice will be held at Riverside Girls High School, Sydney, and it is an Education Department school. This in turn means that filtering and security is tight, often too tight for progressive teachers. Because of this security, I initiated a series of steps to test out various things to make sure we indeed can run a successful Elluminate session at Riverside Girls High School.
Courtesy of coolcatteacher, I became aware that Elluminate was offering a free 12 month subscription for their lite version. Consequently, I subscribed on behalf of my school.
I created a virtual room and asked a couple of computing teachers to attempt to login and if successful we would interact about VET IT. One of the teachers was from rural New South Wales and was not able to login from her department school. The other teacher was able to login from an internet hotspot at one of the cafes near a meeting he was attending. The unsuccessful login was a learning objective in its own right.
My next step was to create a virtual room on April 8th that was open for 24 hours, advertise it on csteachers (the csta’s electronic forum), and monitor the successful logins or lack thereof. It was very interesting. Most teachers could not log in from their schools. Messages flew back and forth on csteachers that tried to resolve the settings that were needed. A very few number of department schools succeeded. Most teachers that tried from home outside of school hours were successful. (Phew!)
Prior to the April 8th experiment, Elluminate was little known. However, after the experiment, most computing teachers at least know the title of the software.
We did discover that Riverside Girls High School can indeed access an Elluminate room through the department infrastructure. We are not sure why other department schools are unable to gain access. This in turn means that we have a high percentage chance of success to run an Elluminate session at our May 19th meeting.
Failing that, the presenter will have his own laptop with mobile broadband capability to access the Elluminate virtual room and present in a physical classroom and in a virtual room for the teachers in rural New South Wales.
Here’s to a successful Elluminate session!
The end goal is to be able to offer some CSTA workshops through web collaboration software so that teachers in rural NSW will not be so professionally isolated.
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