Journal Articles

Webinars

• Webinars have been used by businesses for a while, and now more schools are getting involved.

• Changes traditional educational system which has been: very little teacher/student interaction, focused on memory based skills more than analytical, lecture based, not much flexibility for learning styles, not as much access for information other than book

• In today's world students need a facilitator as well as an instructor, and they are well versed in using technology (sometimes better than teachers)

• There is a gap in the content and methods of feeding students knowledge and what value it is to students with the increasing flow of information

• The improvement on technology has revolutionized training techniques by bringing more diversity and interaction including: Multi-medai aids, computer aided instruction, E-mentoring and E-learning, video conferencing, brainstorming and case studies, simulations, and webinars

• A webinar allows two-way communication to get the audience involved by discussing and sharing ideas with each other and experts that they would not normally get to interact with.

• It's capabilities include: presenters sharing their desktops and applications, chat windows, session recording, and surveys to see what the audience needs

• The benefits include: collaboration, multiple speakers, greater audience access, little location dependency, interactive capabilities, offline learning (archived), material to download, and feedback

• Problems: Not everyone has the hardware, restricted audience involvement, cost, limited modes of multi-media usage

• Personal use: I have participated in three webinars and found them very useful. I have yet to find one I can do with my students since our school does not necessarily have the proper equipment. It was fun interacting with other teachers from around the U.S., and I was able to share the info with my colleagues.

Verma, A., Singh, A. (2010). Webinar - Education through Digital Collaboration. Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, 2 (2), 131-142.


Teacher Collaboration

• This was about teacher collaboration through a networked community: Learning in Networked Communities which develops and launches collaborative technology in science rooms

• Some collaboration problems were: there was organizational chaos of teaching, different teaching styles, different cultural norms, absence of common beliefs enough time to plan
  

• Organization of school mattered: how the space is arranged, how content and students are organized in grade levels, and how much time is allotted to tasks

• The technology allowed new forms of collaboration over time and place and broke down the barriers that don't allow it to happen

• Teachers were able to create parallel curriculum across schools and integrated tasks, schedules, grading, deadlines, and benchmarks

• The collaborating was done synchronous and asynchronous and students' group activities had video conference meetings and then they chatted and emailed while making notebooks

• Problems: hard to coordinate schedules between classrooms, instructional practices were very different, teachers needed a lot of face-to-face collaborating, after school time and plan periods needed to be used to help kids get projects done.

• Teachers really needed to rely on collaborating with each other to create a successful project

• Two teachers could have seen two different groups working and not assessed them fairly since one group could have done all the work but the other took credit

• Personal thoughts: When it comes to collaborating remotely, there is a whole different way of teaching involved. Many more variables have to be considered like time, money, and and how we communicate. Teachers are used to being in control of their environments and delivering information, so it is very difficult to get used to monitoring something online. It is nice to see a work in progress and give feedback along the way like if students make a wiki. Remote collaboration is also difficult because of the scheduling. For example...I have looked into many different remote collaboration opportunities, but I would not be able to let every class participate since I teach six classes a day.

Dunlap, D., Neale, D., Carroll, J. (2000). Teacher Collaboration in a Networked Community. Educational Technology & Society, 3 (3), 1-20.