Edublogs Live

The purpose of this session was to show how features like breakout rooms, application sharing and web tours while also giving participants an opportunity to use Elluminate features themselves.

Warm Up Activity

It started with Jenny Wood demonstrating a short warm of activity she uses to engage learners in virtual classrooms (watch our recording from time 0 – 5.40 mins).

First Jenny asked us all to put up our hands and using the order we put up our hands we had to complete the answers on the next whiteborad. For example, if the number against your name was 1 you were meant to answer the question labeled 1.

Using Break Out Rooms

Break out rooms for group discussions, brainstorming activities or for teaching people how to use software. When participants are in breakout rooms they can’t hear or see what is happening in the other rooms. Please note, Elluminate does not record activities in break out rooms.

There are two main options for sending people to breakout rooms:

1. Create the breakout room and then select the individuals to place in each room.
2. Automatically set up breakout rooms and evenly distribute participants. With this option the moderator(s) need to manually move themselves into a breakout room.

A cool way of using Break out rooms for staff professional development is to send each participant to their own break out room and then get them to turn on application sharing. Moderator(s) can move between the rooms and check how each participant is going — helping where necessary. Hardest aspect of this is initially teaching participants how to turn on application sharing. This works well, without connections problems, using several break out rooms and all participants running application sharing.

To learn more check out Elluminate’s training material for using Breakout room:

1. Using Breakout Rooms (13 minutes)
2. Elluminate Live! Breakout Rooms Quick Reference Guide

Knowing When To Use a Web Tour vs Application Sharing

Application sharing is excellent for displaying what is on a persons desktop but does display considerably slower on the participants screen as opposed to the person who is doing the application share. It also can cause a delay in the audio causing the speaker’s voice to sound a bit funny.

The key with application sharing is to only use when necessary and to slow down any scrolling while using to give adequate time for the screen shared to display on all participants whiteboards. Normally you would restrict application sharing to situations where you were demonstrating software or logging into password protected sites.

For web sites you would normally use web tour unless you needed to log into password protected sites. Watch our recording from 32.15-40.00 to see the difference between watching an online video using a Web Tour as opposed to showing it using an application share.

To learn more check out Elluminate’s training material:

• Using Web Tour
• Elluminate Live! Web Tour Quick Reference Guide
• Using Application Sharing (10 minutes)
• Elluminate Live! Application Sharing Quick Reference Guide

Saving Chat and Whiteboard

Another cool feature is to show your participants how to save chat and whiteboard. This allows them to save everything that was written so they can refer back to what was discussed.

You do this by clicking File > Save.

Recording (60 mins):

https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/playback.jnlp?psid=2009-04-02.1708.D.4C3548A84E624FA254CD6511B7CA09.vcr