Webinar on Digital Citizenship
On August 6th, 2015, our MAET year 2 group, the 4Corners, delivered a Webinar, which you'll see posted below. We invited a deputy, a business administrator, and a Special Education and Teacher Supervisor to speak to our topic on Digital Citizenship. We had a three tiered approach to students from Elementary, Middle School, and High School regarding their online use in what's called a Digital Footprint. Our facilitators were Jeff Layman and Ashlie O'Connor. Following closely as Tech Support was Erin Polski and myself-- although my role depended more on monitoring the backchannels where our audience was asking questions as I live-tweeted the event under the hashtag #MAETBridge. For more information about the content of our webinar, check out our agenda, posted here, for more detail.
We also followed up our webinar with a Thinglink webquest for our audience members who may want to know more. It's embedded below.
So how did it go?
This was the very first Webinar that I've ever seen or engaged in. Previous to this, I'd bashfully stayed away from them simply because I didn't understand that I could watch without being present. I'd heard they were "live", and thought there'd be some kind of expectation to be on screen commenting or asking questions. I found that this was just the opposite! Our audience was able to watch without being "present". They could tweet live to ask questions, or even watch it later since it's archived on Youtube! With this knowledge, I'd be much more willing to join in on a webinar as an audience member.
I'd also be willing to work on producing a webinar again. While there was a bit more "gnashing of teeth" than I was really comfortable with, it was worth it. Plus, I'd wager that a lot of the difficulties we ran into were due to a breakdown in communication of our group as well as interacting with the technology for the first time.
Google Hangouts was the platform that we used to host the webinar. I've used Hangouts before on my mobile devices, but never a desktop computer. Hangouts afforded us the ability to select which person's face we needed to see (whoever was talking), and even mirror our screens to showcase any artifacts or tutorials that were necessary to our presentation. Additionally, we could mute a screen or audio of anyone's feed. The best part was the ability to chat privately during the presentation (although this became distracting) and answer questions submitted by the audience. The questions would show live so that audience members could see and hear what was being answered. Very slick!
We did have some issues. Poor internet connections made our feed stutter occasionally, and sometimes a speaker would become distracted or otherwise unable to hear a question asked. In fact, in the beginning of our webinar one of our experts was unable to login! She was so delayed that she missed the first ten minutes after we went live! I'm still not sure what went wrong, or how it was fixed, and even though we all logged on 45 mins prior to the start of the webinar, I'm not sure we could've prevented it. I think the presenter in question ended up switching three different computers in the end.
If I were to give a webinar again, I'd be sure to have an agenda so that all members could follow, since that was so important in this one. I'd also ensure we had a group member roles well established, with a tech person and back channel follower, as we did. What we didn't do, and I wish that we did, is to have some discussion of the technical terms that we used, maybe some visuals to allude to in the "showcase" function of Google Hangouts. For example, we referenced a "digital footprint" and "digital citizenship" quite a bit, without really explaining what these were until well into the webinar. I don't think our audience missed these, but I think they would have made us stronger.
All in all, this was an exhilarating experience that was really powerful as for me as a teacher and a student of teaching. I'd totally do it again.
I'd also be willing to work on producing a webinar again. While there was a bit more "gnashing of teeth" than I was really comfortable with, it was worth it. Plus, I'd wager that a lot of the difficulties we ran into were due to a breakdown in communication of our group as well as interacting with the technology for the first time.
Google Hangouts was the platform that we used to host the webinar. I've used Hangouts before on my mobile devices, but never a desktop computer. Hangouts afforded us the ability to select which person's face we needed to see (whoever was talking), and even mirror our screens to showcase any artifacts or tutorials that were necessary to our presentation. Additionally, we could mute a screen or audio of anyone's feed. The best part was the ability to chat privately during the presentation (although this became distracting) and answer questions submitted by the audience. The questions would show live so that audience members could see and hear what was being answered. Very slick!
We did have some issues. Poor internet connections made our feed stutter occasionally, and sometimes a speaker would become distracted or otherwise unable to hear a question asked. In fact, in the beginning of our webinar one of our experts was unable to login! She was so delayed that she missed the first ten minutes after we went live! I'm still not sure what went wrong, or how it was fixed, and even though we all logged on 45 mins prior to the start of the webinar, I'm not sure we could've prevented it. I think the presenter in question ended up switching three different computers in the end.
If I were to give a webinar again, I'd be sure to have an agenda so that all members could follow, since that was so important in this one. I'd also ensure we had a group member roles well established, with a tech person and back channel follower, as we did. What we didn't do, and I wish that we did, is to have some discussion of the technical terms that we used, maybe some visuals to allude to in the "showcase" function of Google Hangouts. For example, we referenced a "digital footprint" and "digital citizenship" quite a bit, without really explaining what these were until well into the webinar. I don't think our audience missed these, but I think they would have made us stronger.
All in all, this was an exhilarating experience that was really powerful as for me as a teacher and a student of teaching. I'd totally do it again.