Assignment 2. Facilitate an online event

Title for the session: Blogging for Pre-schoolers

The aims of the session:
1. An opportunity for Beverly Kaye and Tania Coutts to present their action research on blogging at Manaia Kindergarten, and the learning that has occurred through the project.
2. An opportunity to gather pre-school teachers to hear about the project.
3. An opportunity for Adrienne to practice facilitating an online event.

Promotions for the session:
I sent emails to pre-schools and kindergartens that Beverly and Tania wanted to invite. You can view it on Advert for session to email http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AXlH8knGKHHcZGpqZjRqNF82Y2tqZnd0Y3o&hl=en_GB
I also put up a notice at work http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AXlH8knGKHHcZGpqZjRqNF8xMWpwdDdjOGNk&hl=en_GB
and sent an email to the FC09 email group.

I asked people to let me know if they wanted to attend. I then created a participant email list and sent out information and instructions to those attending.

Elluminate web-conference participant fact-sheet http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AXlH8knGKHHcZGpqZjRqNF83NndkeHRiZm0&hl=en_GB

After the event I emailed everyone invited with the link to the recording. http://elluminate.tekotago.ac.nz/play_recording.html?recordingId=1244766870485_1259552835472

Key links:
Manaia Kindergarten’s blog http://www.manaiakindergarten.blogspot.com/
Beverly Kaye’s blog http://ictece.blogspot.com/
Wiki links http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Facilitating_Online/course_mini_conference#Blogging_for_Preschoolers
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:Facilitating_Online/course_mini_conference#Adrienne.27s_Idea
Link to meeting room http://elluminate.tekotago.ac.nz/join_meeting.html?meetingId=1244766870485
Link to back-up meeting room has now expired as it was a 30 day trial.

Technical support:
I made up a page detailing the Elluminate tools and links to Elluminate factsheets and training. http://www.elluminate.com/support/training/. I asked those who were new to Elluminate to arrive at the meeting half an hour early so that I could take them through the tools.


Contingency plan:
I signed up for a free 30 day Elluminate trial so that we would have a back-up meeting room should anything go wrong with Otago’s Elluminate.

Planning and preparation:
I met with Beverly and Tania to view their presentation and work out how to present it in Elluminate ie were the files compatible. We had to convert some video from avi. to mov. files. I met with Sarah in Elluminate and some of the files took an hour to load. Beverly then compressed them so that they would load more quickly.

Beverly and I met with Sarah in Elluminate to practice loading the files, for Beverly to practice using Elluminate and to make sure that everything was working properly.
We had to meet with Sarah each time so that she could make us moderators in Elluminate so that we could load our presentation.

I was aware that some of the participants would not have used Elluminate before, so I wanted to give them some training before the presentation started. I sent out a factsheet and offered practice to them beforehand, and asked them to arrive half an hour early so that I could run them through the tools before the presentation began. I sat down with Sonya from work and showed her how to use the headset and the Elluminate screen to contribute to the meeting.

Things to do for mini-conference http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AXlH8knGKHHcZGpqZjRqNF8xMnZ4Z3Q4M2Rq&hl=en_GB
Second list of things to do for mini-conference http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AXlH8knGKHHcZGpqZjRqNF85ZHdoemR2aGg&hl=en_GB