What a relief...My mini conference is now over. Phew. And thankfully no major dramas, no technical issues and people actually turned up....you could almost call that a success.
I managed to get onto elluminate early and load up photos of both myself and my guest speaker Fiona. All that is easy stuff now. I ensured I had my microphone and headset to help with clarity of my voice, and went through the audio set up. I had spoken to Fiona in the morning again and we discussed some of the discussions that could take place. Initially I had a panic attack at the thought that I didn't have any slides or power points to present but after talking it through with Fiona we decided that 1. it was too late anyway and 2. it would be a short presentation where Fiona could present some of the tools on elluminate. This would encourage engagement and discussion. In hindsight I think that having no slides added a freshness that benefited our session.
I had 5 participants attend, made up of one of my students, one colleague, one midwife friend and two participants from the facilitating online class. So with my lecturer and guest presenter there were 8 all up. A great number. I started my recording, and began my introduction. I think I was good at fooling everyone about how nervous I really was. The recording link to my session is below;
http://elluminate.tekotago.ac.nz/play_recording_confirmation.html
Everything went really smoothly, the only hiccup I had was that I could not chat to 'everyone' only staff members. I trouble shooted for a while and then asked Sarah. Eventually she came to my rescue to clicking on my name where the chat icon comes up and problem fixed. Listening back to the recording I said a lot of 'um' though. I was not aware of how often I said 'um' until I listened. Ha. I also stopped the recording too soon, as even though I had started to close up the session, people then continued to make comments and discuss. So for next time I think the recording will be the very last thing I do.
Another thing I learnt was about planning the time and length of a session. I had anticipated that the session would be short and only go for 15mins. However even without discussing all of the things Fiona and I talked about it still went for over half an hour. I guess that is the nature of discussions.
After the event I had a chat with Sarah. We came up with the plan to see if we could get some feedback from some of the participants on how the session went. So I will email the participants I know and see if I can get some honest feedback posted to my blog.
Keep you posted.
Jade
Thank you very much for a very interesting session. What I liked about what you did is that you made the effort to advertise your session to people outside the course. Consequently, you have a good size audience with a range of interested and experience - well done.
ReplyDeleteI did feel you needed to give more info on the wiki so we knew what to expect, and as you have already indicated, you need to evaluate your event.
You had a good facilitation style - you checked out the technology with us and gave us all the opportunity to interact and ask questions. I know you didn;t feel that confident, but you didn't come over as being nervous.
The only other thing is...I felt that we being being pressured to end early because you kept saying that the session was only going to be 20 mins. But with a topic as interesting as the one you were facilitating, I guess you had to be prepared for talking more than that :)
Hi Jade, it was good to be able to come to your session, I found it to be a useful discussion - thank you. I can certainly identify with what you said in your previous posting about not having a clue how many people will turn up! For my event I thought the group could be anything from tiny to large, so felt I needed to go into the session prepared to be adaptable. The not knowing certainly added to my nerves. Karen
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