Connecting educators interested in innovation

Elluminate - Lots of Session Inspiring Ideas in the Moderator Toolbar

It was very interesting running moderator training with a selection of educators / teachers from settings such as the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Sports Museum and Sovereign Hill, Ballarat. As a presenter, what the session did was to get me thinking about how the Elluminate Moderator Interactive tools could be used more widely. On one hand we have an Elluminate toolbar and on the other, groups of teachers from diverse settings wanting to use these in a very wide variety of educational settings. Don't think of Elluminate as PowerPoint with a headset, there are heaps of things that you can do with the Elluminate Interactive Tools.
So here are some of my ideas.
This blogpost is a work in progress, so I will add more ideas as I continue with the training. If you have any great ideas, please add via the comments box.

What I thought I would do is look at some of the elements of the Elluminate moderator toolbar and look at some different uses for those tools by moderators and presenters.

Application Sharing

01. Use it to share anything that you have created on your computer [remember, this tool has no audio].
02.Use it to demonstrate any application / program on your computer. It doesn't matter whether the participant has that application / program or not, e.g. if you were on a Mac you could show Apple iLife apps to participants on Windows computers.
03. Use it to demonstrate software that participants may not have on their computer, but that you suggest that they purchase e.g Comic Life.
04. Show off the features of some Open Source software that enhances teaching and learning in your area of expertise. This might be software on the DEECD EduSTAR image which is on most teacher and student computers but is less used that it should be.
05. Show off some high end software for your curriculum areas e.. Sibelius in Music, Mathematica in Maths, Final Cut Pro in multimedia. This allows teachers to see the application before they buy.
06. Show off some subscription websites in a certain curriculum areas e.g. Mathletics, Purple Mash. Brain Pop etc. This allows teachers to see the website before they subscribe.
07. Use it to show participants how to fill in online forms and surveys.

Live Video

01. Switch it on at the beginning so that your audience can see what the presenter [ and maybe the moderator looks like]. Participants like to "put a face to a name". Remember Live Video is Bandwidth intensive so limit its use.
02. Allow students to play around with the Live Video Preview before transmitting [maybe?].
03. Remember as a moderator you can take away the Video camera permissions. Make sure you know how to do this!

Polling

01. Use the default "tick and cross" to keep the interactivity up, e.g. you could say "give me a tick if you a following what I am saying or a cross if you would like me to go over that last point again".
02. Set up a poll at the beginning of the session. Ask a question about the upcoming content of the presentation with some graded answers. The answers will give the presenter a feel for the knowledge level of participants.
03. Set up a poll that when published will encourage discussion amongst participants.
04. If you are a moderator you might ask whether the presenter agrees with the answers of the audience.

File Transfer

01. Handouts via File Transfer are great. It is a way of getting extra content to participants with out crowding the presentation.
02. Any File Transfer handouts remain with the Elluminate session recording, so those catching the session later via the recording still get the handouts.
03. Use a file format for your handouts that all can open. PDF, [Portable Document Format is the best as everyone can open it]. You can turn your work such as Word documents [if using the later versions of Word] by going to Save As and selecting PDF in file format [both on a Mac & Windows]
04. As a presenter think of some extra resources that teachers might need to enhance their experience of your talk. Some handouts which they can use with their students are usually most appreciated.

Web Tour

01. This is a great way to show video content. In my opinion it is better than the Multimedia Library, in that participants don't need any extra software like QuickTime or Windows Media Player.
02. The trick is that you need to have you video of a website, so that you can get a URL of that video link to paste into the Web Tour window.
03. I have my videos for this blog in a website made with Apple's iWeb and hosted on my Mobile Me website account. [See examples below]. I could use this URL to paste into the Elluminate Web Tour if I wished.
04. There are some other ways of posting your video on a website to get a URL. Here is a screencast I made about using YouTube, Vimeo and Teacher Tube.
http://guidetoinnovation.ning.com/video/adding-video-in-elluminate-web
05. Here is another screencast that will be of use to DEECD staff only. It is on how you can use FUSE to upload video and get that URL for your Web Tour.
http://guidetoinnovation.ning.com/video/adding-video-in-elluminate-...
06. So now that this issue of getting the URL has been sorted out, you can think of taking some video to show in your Elluminate session. This might be "real life video" illustrating the presentation.
07. Access to the tools for making video are so prevalent these days. Think Flip camera or alternatives, iPod Nano, smartphone etc.

Timer

01. Put the timer on 5 or 10 minutes before the session starts for all to see. Participants may be all set up waiting to go. The timer will let them no whether they have enough time to grab a glass of water, go to the toilet etc.
02. If your session has a definite ending time you may wish to put a timer on for the moderators only, e.g a five minute warning so the presenter knows when to finish etc.
03. Use the timer when using Polling, e.g. if you want a quick polling activity, set the timer on for say 2 minutes and tell participant you will lock the poll when the countdown is finished
04. Do a similar thing if you are having participants using the Whiteboard tools, e.g tell them to stop drawing / writing when the timer countdown to zero.