Have a Voice, Make a Choice: Vote!

It's an election year, and the campaigns are in full swing, urging the electorate to exercise their power by voting to ensure the future. Voting is, according to Thomas Jefferson, "The rational and peacable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people." Lyndon Johnson added, "The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.” And Henry Louis Mencken provided this reason for the importance of this option: "Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.”

In the Confer classroom, voting (or polling) can be a powerful instructional tool. It encourages active student participation, gives learners an opportunity to apply or test their learning, and lets the instructor discover quickly how well students are following or understanding the materials or concepts being taught. A quick spot poll spices up a class session, providing a break in your content presentation and there is ample research evidence that student response systems ("clickers") in face-to-face educational settings are effective and can improve student learning.

The "clicker" in the Confer classroom is the Polling tool. This video shows how easily it can be set up and how you can decide to show results to students.



How might you use this? Typically, according to Caldwell's research on instructors' use of student response systems, instructors prepare PowerPoint slides in advance with between two and five questions per class session. The questions are used to:

• begin or focus discussion
• require interaction with peers
• collect votes following a debate
• assess student preparation
• survey students's opinions, attitudes, reactions
• practice problems
• guide thinking (e.g., "Which step comes next?")
• conduct experiments or illustrate human responses (especially in the social sciences)
• have fun

It should be noted that students in the Confer classrooms have other response/feedback options. They can use emoticons, for example, to indicate confusion or even signal when the instructor is going too fast or needs to speed things up. Private or public chat can be used, and (as in the physical classroom), hands can be raised.

But voting with one's peers is powerful. The student who makes a choice on-screen has become an "investor" in the answer and will generally pay attention to the poll results. These results can be reassuring whether they reflect agreement or confusion: the student has peers who agree and are either right or similarly confused. Using the polling tool is an effective way to keep students in your class accountable: if they know they'll be required to answer questions, they're more likely to come to your class prepared. And, as Rebecca Gomez of Cypress College describes below, polling can be used to give (or remove) students class participation credit.



Like a general election, getting out the vote takes some prep work. Prepare your questions in advance, and use this tool frequently in your early lectures so that students  become familiar and comfortable with it. You may have to work on your timing as you collect student responses so that you don't jump to results before they're fully collected. It's also a good idea to poll your students about the polling process itself: are they comfortable with it? Once you've grown comfortable with the polling tools, you'll want to build a collection of polls you can insert into any lecture: if you do, consider sharing this with colleagues who are getting started with Confer.

Getting out the vote in your classroom can improve your students' success. It can help to add stimulation, engagement, understanding, and active learning to your online lectures. And, once you've got the knack of it, it's fun!

Do you agree?

The Key to Lively, Productive Meetings

We've spent a lot of time and energy working with our users and vendor to make Confer a great tool for online instructors, with good results. The Confer classroom is equipped with assessment tools, interactive tools for collaboration, and terrific content presentation options. You can teach comfortably and effectively with this toolset, and I'm happy to report that they're getting better as we listen to and respond to your feedback.

At about this time last year, though, I started thinking about how CCC Confer is used by our community (myself included) when students aren't involved. Half of our business comes from Meet & Confer and Call Confer sessions. What have we done to make their meetings more effective? Are there tools we should be adding that will make life easier for those of us who meet regularly online? Is it possible to use technology to enhance meetings, inspire creative idea sharing, sort shared ideas, move people toward consensus, produce action plans, and record proceedings? Can we do for online meeting facilitators what we've managed to do for online instructors: make their jobs easier and more productive?

We think so. We've just added a new tool - CCC Brainstorm - to bolster our online meeting tools. Here's a short (one minute) introduction:



The software is powered by FacilitatePro and licensed to the California Community Colleges through an agreement with CCC Confer. You can use it online or face-to-face, synchronously or asynchronously, according to your meeting needs and circumstances. You can learn more about Facilitate by downloading this document, but I'll summarize some key features here.

Shared Agenda. Brainstorm lets everyone see the agenda you've prepared from a Web browser. The advantage here is that the agenda is interactive: by clicking on each agenda item, they can view the ideas that have been shared, react to them, and add their own.

Brainstorming. Everyone in the meeting can add ideas - at the same time - without raising their hands or waiting for anyone else to finish. The ideas dynamically appear on the screen as they are added and generate a sense of collaboration and interaction that is often difficult to produce in overly structured group meetings.

Expansion and Elaboration. As ideas are added, meeting participants can add their own comments and explain, enlarge, or develop those ideas with comments that are added in line with the original ideas. Imagine trying to do this with a standard flip chart! The ideas might end up on a separate page or "shrink-written" on the margins, with the predictable and all-too-common result of being incomprehensible to anyone trying to make sense of it later.

Sorting into Categories. An active and engaged meeting can generate a lot of ideas. These can be sorted into categories as they are added or later, allowing the participants to recognize emerging themes or to distinguish and appreciate how the ideas fit into possible solutions.

Building Consensus. It's easy to take a list of brainstormed ideas and ask meeting participants to "vote" on them or rate them according to some criterion. For example, you can ask them to indicate their degree of agreement about a proposed strategy, and even to comment about why or why not this idea makes sense. This happens in seconds: it's amazing how quickly the software allows a group to recognize its own voice and come to agreement about the issues being discussed.

The result can be graphed - again, instantly - and shared in real time with the group. This is far more effective than the Confer polling tool, which is great for impromptu questions. This tool actually presents a detailed vote breakdown, statistical results, and graphs for your entire list of ideas. The summary table shows overall votes, weighted averages, and standard deviations.

Action Planning. As great as it is to generate ideas and come to consensus, a good meeting isn't complete unless it results in action. The CCC Brainstorm software includes an on-screen action planner, which makes it easy to set goals, give them start and finish dates, assign them to individuals or groups, and display the action plan in a time chart. The software includes standard project management features: responsibility, start and end dates, status information for each item, and a graphical time chart display. It's not meant to replace project management software, but it will export your action plan into those applications once you've got the group to focus on next steps.

Complete Meeting Report. No need to take minutes or transcode illegible flip charts! With this tool, you - or anyone in the meeting - can instantly print a report that will include, in an attractive package, tabulated results and every one of the ideas and plans your group has produced. It's also possible to import this report into a word processor so it can be incorporated into a larger document.

We're just getting started on the video tutorials for this product, but you'll find enough to get started on our YouTube playlist.

Meanwhile, here's wishing you better meetings this year!

CCC Confer: Where Do I Start?

Another semester and you're still not ready for online real-time interaction with your students? It's not that hard! You can do it! Let's get you started with some simple suggestions.

1. Try It Out! You don't have to start blind with your students or anyone else. There's a simple way to get your feet (or at least your toes) wet without having to feel embarrassed or under pressure. Try our practice rooms for free. You can sign into the rooms any time, from anywhere, and see how this thing works. Try the whiteboard, upload a PowerPoint or some image files, share your desktop applications, go on a Web tour. No one will see you making mistakes, and you'll soon discover exactly which tools make you comfortable and which you might want to practice with more before using them with students.

2. Get Some Training. You can get live online training from our expert (and oh-so-understanding and patient) Client Services team, or you can choose recorded training or self-paced instruction. It's a painless way to pick up the tips and techniques that will make it possible for you to be successful online with your students.

3. Sign up for an Account. If you're an instructor in the California Community Colleges (any of them), you're eligible for a free account. Follow this link to register for a MyConfer account, which will make it possible for you to schedule classes, office hours, conferences, etc. whenever you like. With this account, all of your meetings and archives will be available to you when you login.

4. Review our Videos. The "Two Minutes to Better Confer Meetings" series provides quick reminders and tips for the most common Confer uses: application sharing, file sharing, polls, privacy settings, recurring meetings, the timer, uploading PowerPoint and image files, Voice Over IP, Web cameras, Web tour, and the whiteboard. And our Confer channel features real instructors (like you) demonstrating and explaining how and why they use CCC Confer in their online classrooms.

5. Record a Trial Session. Before you schedule a live session with your students, schedule a session without an audience. Get everything ready in advance (PowerPoints, activities, polls, Web sites, and so on), login to your session, and press the "Record" button. Deliver your lecture or presentation as if you were doing it with a live audience, pacing yourself and pausing in appropriate spots for student feedback, and stop the recording when you're through. When the archive becomes available (generally in a few hours), look at it critically for mistakes or things you'll want to change the next time. This is an excellent way to improve your online teaching skills: see yourself as your students will. You may want to repeat this step a few times, and even to allow students or colleagues to view the archive and give you constructive criticism or feedback.

6. You're Ready: Schedule Your Class. If you've taken these five steps, you're ready to "go live" online with your students. Does that mean your first class will go smoothly, without a hitch? Maybe and maybe not. I belive, however the first class goes, that it guarantees you'll know what to do when the unexpected happens, and that you're likely to keep going despite minor setbacks.

Be sure to let us know how things go!

Do I HAVE to Teach Online in Real Time?

A good friend of mine is a model of effective educational technology. She exemplifies good online teaching and is skilled in the use of CCC Confer with students and with her peers as a workshop leader and evangelist on her campus. She's been teaching online classes for several years, and using CCC Confer for about five years now. But she's only begun in the last year to use CCC Confer in real time with her students.

What took her so long? Well, she didn't see the need for synchronous online instruction, and she certainly didn't feel comfortable with the thought of having to "be perfect" with a live audience. This instructor (let's call her Arianna) had worked tirelessly on making recorded sessions (via Confer) that taught the concepts she wanted to teach and were re-usable and captioned, thus ensuring maximum accessibility for her students. Because she could delete and re-record the sessions that didn't go as she'd planned, she was very comfortable with this method of providing personalized lectures and teaching to her online students. In the synchronous world, there aren't any "do-overs" if things go south. Why ruin a good thing?

What happened with Arianna is that she was exposed to other instructors who were using Confer in real time with their online classes. She heard about how much these instructors enjoyed the social interactions with their students and their discussions about the merits of hearing and answering questions in real time. She began to wonder about her isolated online students and whether or not some of them might be better served if they could access their instructor in real time. Perhaps most importantly, she discovered that her peers - people just like her - were doing it. If they could do it, why couldn't Arianna?

She's discovered that there are some things that work in real-time and others that she believes are still best left to asynchronous delivery. For example, she believes that synchronous content delivery is best suited to simple lessons that can be "chunked" and discussed, or for which students can be encouraged to react quickly. When the topic is more complex, or requires reflection by students, she still prefers to present it asynchronously and review it in real time later.

You may be like Arianna; if so, relax. It takes time to become comfortable with this technology, and we're all still discovering the best ways to use it. Try some recorded lectures and see if those are a good fit for your students. Hone your skills and become familiar with the tools (e.g., whiteboard, chat, application sharing) so you can adapt your presentations to fit your teaching needs. And keep an open mind about going online with a live audience.

Maybe not today, but there may come a time when you'll want to take that step.

Two Minutes to Better Confer Sessions

The hard-working Client Services team at Confer have produced some very useful - and conveniently short - videos to help you succeed online in your Confer sessions. They all use the new sleek interface and are designed to show you quickly and clearly what you need to know to use the tool you want to use. Enjoy!

























Dandies, eh? Let us know what else you'd like to see a short video tutorial about!

You Did WHAT with Web Conferencing?

I recently gave a presentation at Blackboard World entitled, "You Did WHAT with Blackboard Collaborate?" It was an attempt to demonstrate the diversity of uses and users we've discovered at CCC Confer and to highlight some of the unusual things our users do with this technology. We learn more about Web conferencing from the faculty and staff who use them than we can ever teach them. The users of this technology are the real stars: they invent, adapt, create, and transform Web conferencing as they apply it to educational tasks. Here are some examples:

1. Teach Art. Robin Rogers Cloud at Saddleback College demonstrates effective use of the whiteboard to show students how their paintings can be improved. She demonstrates where the horizon is, shows how darkening certain objects improves the contrast, sharpens the trees and shoreline, and divides the painting to show the center and different parts of the picture. Robin demonstrates why she loves this tool for art instruction.
2. Be Quiet. In an acoustically flawed recording, Donna Eyestone demonstrates a powerful point: that in the synchronous online classroom, silence can be golden. You have to give your online students time to gather their thoughts - and their courage - to speak up and join the discussion.
3. Play Music. Donna has also taught us about the comforting value of music when an online class is beginning.
4. Podcast Lectures. The "Podcast Queen" of the California Community Colleges helped us develop a server for storing and playing podcasts for anyone in the system. 
5. Save Your Job. Amelito Enriquez, winner of a White House honor for engineering mentoring, used CCC Confer to boost enrollment in his classes and save the engineering program at Canada College.
6. Teach with a Tablet. Amelito discovered that tablet PCs were uniquely suited to his brand of instruction, which requires considerable annotation.
7. Erase with a White Pen. A math instructor at Grossmont College, Irene Palacios, discovered that she could use the whiteboard in an unorthodox way to erase her PowerPoint mistakes.
8. Make Short Video Lectures. Irene discovered the value of archived lectures. She has created scores of short video lectures to demonstrate math principles and practices.
9. Flip the Classroom. Irene and several others like her have discovered that this technology is valuable even for face-to-face students, who benefit from re-watching and reviewing archived lessons.
10. Have Face-to-Face Students Interact with Online Students. In Santa Rosa, Michael McKeever teaches a hybrid class with face-to-face and online students attending at the same time. He uses breakout rooms to combine the two groups for problem-solving.
11. Impersonate a Computer. At Sierra College, instructors run an Online Writing Center for tutoring students with writing assignments. Jeanne Guerin has captured a session in which a student logged in and was confused about whether or not the other end of the conversation she was having was human.
12. Share a Calculator. At Foothill College, Marc Knobel teaches math online. He found that application sharing and the TI calculator emulation software were terrific tools.
13. Teach 100 Students at a Time. At Cypress College, Rebecca Gomez actually teaches more than 100 students at a time online...
14. Teach for 4+ Hours. ... and she teaches for a long time!
15. Work with the Captioner. Rebecca discovered that the captioner can be a valuable classroom assistant if you remember to use them.
16. Teach Adult Education.  At San Diego City College, as at most community colleges, adult education is very important, and Claudia Tornsaufer uses CCC Confer to teach music classes to a diverse audience. Some of her students are in their twenties, while others are in the 80+ age range.
17. Teach from Another Country. Laurie Huffman, from Los Medanos College in northern California, actually travels overseas to teach her classes. We've had classes taught from Paris, France, Alaska, and even China!
18. Use the Timer. The timer is an effective tool for reinforcing "time on task" and learning enhancement, as Cyndi Reese explains.
19. Count to Three. A math instructor from Lake Tahoe Community College showed us a technique he uses that allows the whole online class to respond to a question and give him an "instant assessment" of how they're doing.
20. Go to a Hospital. Larry Green also shared a story about a student who was hospitalized during one of his classes, but still managed to participate and succeed in the class

New from OTC '12: The Online Teaching Conference

I just spent the better part of a week with you (or some of you) at the Online Teaching Conference at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose. Great presentations, great networking, and one unforgettable experience! I can't reproduce it here, but I can give you a part of what we shared.

How to Design a Successful Hybrid Mathematics Course with Rena Petrello




Rena, a former MEET participant, shares and demonstrates components of a successful online developmental math course . She shows how to quickly and easily create video lessons (without a camera) and use CCC Confer for holding study sessions and office hours online.

Improving Collaboration between Community Colleges; Bettering Student & Faculty Opportunities with Michael McKeever



Another MEET participant, Michael McKeever, was not even present in San Jose but managed to present this session online via CCC Confer from a conference of his own being held in Orange Grove. So two conferences - and their attendees - were joined online and "face-to-face" with this session!

Best of all worlds: F2F, Hybrid and Online All Together!  with Alex Cheroske



  
Alex (yes, another MEET participant) demonstrates how a college biology class was developed to provide an engaging learning environment in a variety of formats for today's students, using CCC Confer to accommodate online and hybrid settings. 

Incorporating Multimedia and Field Experiences in the Online Classroom with Doug Borcoman

 

Still another former MEET participant, Doug Borcoman, provides information on the pedagogical aspects of multimedia delivery and showcases some important video lessons conducted remotely utilizing CCC Confer, Studio, and YouTube. He gives very practical tips throughout the presentation.

There were many other excellent presentations at OTC, and you can find many of them for replay here.  I think they'll convince you that you need to make plans to attend OTC '13 in person!