Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jason Graham on November 19, 2010 at 7:38pm

Lucy

As a first time presenter and moderator with no Elluminate experience I thought it was quite straight forward. I understand the need for moderators MUCH better after presenting! Just being able to share and make connections with people was the most powerful aspect for me. We've had such a positive response from staff that admin is now considering working our PD days around the GE conference days to give staff the option of attending our in house and virtual conferences.

When is the next one?

Jay

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Permalink Reply by Lucy Gray on November 20, 2010 at 8:56am

Hi Jason -

Yes, the moderators were absolutely key and our volunteers really jumped up to help. I agree, too, that sharing and connecting with others was pretty powerful as traditional schools aren't really set up to let those opportunities happen.

Did a lot of people attend from your school? That's amazing that your school is considering building PD days around the event. Steve doesn't want to wait a year to do another one, so I expect that there will be lots of follow up activities. Stay tuned as we figure out what we are doing.

Thanks your thoughts!

Lucy

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Permalink Reply by Jason Graham on November 20, 2010 at 9:10am

Lucy

Great thanks, please keep me in mind if there is any way I can help out for the next one! I know weve got a few educators here that are willing to present and moderate for the next round.

Regards

Jay

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Permalink Reply by Liliana O'Reilly on November 20, 2010 at 9:07am

I was a first time presenter as well and I found this experience very inspiring. It was amazing that so many teachers from all over the world joined online to share their ideas and opinions. In my home country (Romania), teachers usually participate in activities, projects and conferences that bring them credits or points because the educational system here requires them to have as many credits as possible. This conference was different because the joy of sharing and the very interesting sessions featured made me give more without expecting points, credits or certificates. I loved it!

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Permalink Reply by Theresa Allen on November 20, 2010 at 10:22am

As a first-time participant in the conference I found it very informative and can use what I learned immediately. I enjoy the convenience of listening and participating at home or work.

As a technology elementary teacher my goal this year is to connect my students globally and to have them put digital citizenship into practice. Most of my students are involved in globally collaborative projects now and one class is involved in the Digiteen Project. I chose sessions that would help the students and myself grow globally through Web 2.0 tools and ideas for projects. I learned from:
1. Dr. Christine Davis, "Teaching and Assessing..."
2. Dr. Pheo Martin's "Creating Learning Objectives & Activities for Global Ed"
3. Dr. Colin Marlaire
4. Julie Lindsay, "Flat Classroom Project Student Summit"
5. Brian Mannix, "Pay it Forward Across the Globe"
6. Diane Midness, "Teachers Guide to International Collaborative Projects"

Please send my sincere thanks to all who put this conference together! It was great to connect with people from across the globe in one space at the same time. I learned a lot in the chat box as well as the sessions! The moderators were a great help as well!

Theresa

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Permalink Reply by John Lawrence on November 20, 2010 at 10:33am

Overall, I would have to say that the conference was fantastic, with many excellent presentions from start to finish!

GOOD: The pre-loading of most powerpoint presentations and use of webtour for live content. The ability to save chats at the end of the discussion and ESPECIALLY the ability to view recordings after the fact, for free.
SURPRISING: I was surprised that more presenters did not take advantage of the videoconferencing and wonder whether some of the other features (quiz module, workshop module) were necessary to load.
BAD: The listing of the various conference "tracks". While the "Keynote Speakers" track was listed in time and daily order, the various conference tracks were not. This made it very confusing to try and figure out whether I wanted to attend a keynote presentation, presentation, or review the recording of a previous presentation. I also wish that there had been some kind of visual summary of the presentations similar in a calendar type format (yes, I'm obviously a visual learner :-) ).

Q: Would I like to see this next year? YES! YES! YES! (I might even present!)

Q: How do we best reach educators in other countries? The fact that this conference has been held once will encourage more participation from far-flung educators in the future. I can't speak to the use of live translation, because I didn't attend a presentation that utilized this feature, but increasing translation of the conference documents into languages other than Spanish would probably help to increase non-English speaking participation. IMO, also announcing a date A.S.A.P. will help to get the word out (after the requisite "post-conference collapse" of Steve and Lucy) and ensure greater participation next year. It is a bit trickier given that Elluminate has been bought by Blackboard and there may be some uncertainty about access to the Elluminate software with a similar/same feature set. The fact that Elluminate worked so marvelously, at least in my experiencing of the conference, during this conference is a big testament to the software engineers/hardware engineers/IT staff at Elluminate.

Q: Magical moments. It was great to see several the involvement of youth/younger presenters during the conference. I also began to realize the significance of the global community in our own personal self-education (it is going to take a month to digest all of the resources and ideas that I obtained during the course of the conference).

Congratulations on a wonderful conference. Special thanks to Steve, Lucy and the rest of the organizing team!

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Permalink Reply by John Lawrence on November 20, 2010 at 10:46am

Question for everyone - NOT feedback

To me, one of the refreshing aspects of this conference was the lack of "policy meetings" or the requisite "annual general meeting" that seems to be an aspect of many conferences. The conference was truly an "educational" opportunity.

I am currently helping to plan the first, inaugural, Online Conference for Music Therapy (OCMT2011), to be held on March 5-6, 2011. We are planning to utilize the Elluminate software, as well as Moodle.

Q: How do we get participants to recognize the value in an online conference, while removing the "face-to-face" and "requisite meetings" aspect of a traditional conference?

Your ideas and comments would be appreciated, as well as ideas regarding where we might go in order to obtain funding/underwriting of the conference (unlike most music therapy conference, this was an idea that was created outside of the normal music therapy associations, hence - no underwriting of the costs associated with the conference for things such as the cost of the Elluminate subscription, web hosting, banking fees, etc.). I would, personally, love to see a conference without registration fees, similar to what I experienced at GlobalEdCon!

Sincerely,
John Lawrence MMT, MTA
Chairperson, OCMT2011

For more information about this conference, please visit:
Facebook group: OCMT2011 - Online Conference for Music Therapy
Twitter: #OCMT2011
Website: ocmt2011.webs.com
Blog: onlineconference4mt.wordpress.com
E-mail: ocmt2011@gmail.com

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Permalink Reply by Patricia E. Barrett on November 20, 2010 at 11:31am

Steve, Lucy, Julie--you all deserve to be widely recognized for this paradigm-busting conference. Thank you from the deepest recesses of my heart for your vision, your courage, your sweat equity and your generosity of spirit to those of us presenters who had not even heard of Elluminate before the conference. Thanks, too, to all of the moderators who held our hands when we most needed them.

As mentioned in the closing session, I believe that for maximum reach we should re-index the presentations by conference stream and in logical order--not in the chronological order in which they were presented. Maybe we could ask all presenters to submit an outline of their presentations with the main points; some of the presenters were working from a text or script that could probably be recaptured from them and submitted to a central collection point. We could use the descriptive paragraphs as a start (e.g. "Abstract"), but two of the presentations I attended veered afield from both the title and the contents of the teaser paragraphs. Together, we can undoubtedly refine this thought much further. As a former large conference organizer, I'd be happy to volunteer to be part of this "capture" exercise, although I am not a technologist. Perhaps there are some out there who know just the right free technology to use for creating "proceedings". Maybe something as simple as creating four separate proceedings .pdf docs--one for each stream. This is something that we should put out very quickly imo.

I hope that everyone involved with the conference is enjoying a well-deserved, head-clearing rest.

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Permalink Reply by Robin Cochran Dirksen on November 20, 2010 at 6:21pm

It has been awesome! I haven't had time to attend too many live sessions, but I'm so thankful that sessions are recorded. I wish that somehow it could be uncluded as a professional development option in our state, like Jason mentioned. I envision someone from a district taking the recommended sessions, organizing them by discipline and presenting them as choices for viewing at an in-service. I think the sessions are much like F2F conferences, some were better than others.

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Permalink Reply by MariaD on November 21, 2010 at 7:57am

I really enjoyed the conference, and will be watching recordings of many more sessions. Here are my suggestions:

- Allow member tagging of sessions. For example, I made a collection of math sessions for my math communities:
Descriptions
Links to recordings - Linda Stojanovska helped
It took some doing, and I probably missed some sessions... Tagging would help, and there are existing tools for that.

If we make a separate call for community members to invite tracks from other countries, and explain how, we could have that happening. It would probably take translating the designated announcement, and forwarding it to some key people and networks in that country. We could crowdsource translations through existing tools, again, similarly to what TED does for closed captioning.

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Permalink Reply by Jan Wee on November 21, 2010 at 9:21am

I found the conference to be exceptional- novel concept, excellent sessions, full of valuable resources, instructional strategies, and perspectives. Charles Fadel's session was especially meaningful as I am reading Bernie Trilling and Fadel's book, 21st Century Skills- Learning for Life in Our Times and we will be doing a book study and are initiating a "think tank team" to help guide our district. The matrix he used to show how curriculum can be aligned with 21st Century learning skills is a tool that we could use to map our curriculum gaps and further our efforts to align with 21st C learning. I highly recommend this book and Charles' session.

I would like to see sessions focusing on 21st C instructional strategies-- specific practices easily adoptable by elementary, middle and high school level educators who seek to engage and align teaching practices with 21st C skills and knowledge framework.

I did find that the challenges are universal... watching the chat window validated that educators across the globe face similar struggles shifting instructional practice away from the "sage on the stage" to engaged, student-centered learning.

Thank you for an amazing conference. I love that I can tap all the recordings of the many sessions I missed.
Jan

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Permalink Reply by Sharon Rice on November 21, 2010 at 9:43am

I was unable to attend, due to schedules, etc... but now that I am off this week... Oh, my!
I have already viewed one session and have so many more that I am interested in viewing... don't know how I can find the time to bake that turkey this week!

Thanks so much! I have already sent some links to faculty members at Fort Worth Academy. We are a K-8 high tech school, always looking for global collaborations!

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