Tonight I jumped a hurdle. A few of them really. I was moderator of an elluminate room running the introductory session of Students 2.0. Anne Mirtschin, wonderful woman that she is, had provided me with quite a bit of training over the past week and it was thanks to her that I felt reasonably comfortable about running the session.Thanks also need to go to Adrian Camm who helped out with this session in a moderator capacity to ensure it didn’t fall over!
I fully expected there to be no-one with me in the room. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Seventeen people attended, all of them teachers from Australia and the United States. Some, like Monika Hardy from Colorado, got up at 3.15 in the morning to attend. One of the students from my school was trying to get in but had problems with elluminate on her computer. This is going to be the biggest challenge facing this initiative; establishing the student base that will make the whole thing viable. Hopefully the teachers who were there will be able to generate interest amongst their student body and we may see them getting on board in weeks to come.
I put together a short presentation as an introduction; you can find it embedded on a Wiki I’ve created to support the sessions I’m going to be running in the coming weeks. Here’s a rundown of what’s on offer;
RSS – finding what you’re interested in and bringing information to you. May 5th 7.30pm AEST
Blogs – Learn how to set one up and write a post that gets you noticed. May 12th 7.30pm AEST
Google Docs – storing and sharing your information in the cloud. May 19th 7.30pm AEST
Ning and other social network environments – how to work and learn with others. May 26th 7.30pm AEST
Wikis – for storing, sharing and showing what you can do. June 3rd 7.30pm AEST
Twitter – not just small talk. Using Twitter for learning purposes. June 10th 7.30pm AEST
Social bookmarking -organising your learning. June 17th 7.30pm AEST
This is all a bit of an experiment at the moment. It may work, it may not. Hopefully it will prove to be valuable for students; we’ll just have to wait and see how things pan out. The session was recorded, but my limited understanding of elluminate means that I’m not sure how to find the recording and get it linked into the Students 2.0 site! Hopefully, Steve Hargadon can help out with that for me.
I hope students will find the space and see the possibilities of directing their own learning with the support of teacher mentors. Time will tell.
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 
It all worked out in the end. I was amazed that US people made the effort to get up in the wee hours. Such dedication. I found the chat to be quite intense – as if people had known each other for ages. I suppose they had so much in common. Thanks for the experience.
Hi Jenny, It is so good to read this post, that you survived, had an audience and hopefully enjoyed it all. It does get easier with time, and I have started to love this environment. For the Monday night of education week, we will have our parents, students and staff all joining in the one classroom in elluminate. So I can imagine we will have all sorts of problems and issues as well. Getting into elluminate still is not easy but once it is mastered it is a great environment to work in. Thanks for your thanks, but it was a pleasure to work with you and help out where I could.
Thanks for leaving a comment Anne. I am feeling more confident heading into tonight’s session about RSS. Thank goodness!! It really is another learning curve in this very long learning curve we are on. It’s nice to be able to build skills doing something you believe in. I’m not anticipating big numbers again, and will be happy if even just a couple show up. Your Education week session with parents sounds like it will be challenging, but interesting too.
You’re a wonderful support Anne. Nice knowing you’re out there. : )