Wimba+Session

Virtual Classrooms Wimba

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Description In this task, we used a program aking to what is approaching as real a classroom as possible on the Internet: Wimba. Wimba is a Virtual Class setting where participants can either listen to and watch the teacher lecture through an Whiteboard context, WebConference, or both. Given the right permissions, students/participants can also add comments, additions, orclarifications to the conversation/instruction. There are even nifty little emoticon tools for people to use to 'raise their hand,' 'agree,' 'disagree,' etc. In addition to all of this, Wimba allows the main user to record the entire session, which will archive the session for future reference by teacher and pupil alike. Download it? Sure. It can come in MP3 and MP4 flavors. Podcast it? Why not! Once it is in the format you need, do with it what you will.

As for our part in this, our Wimba Session was to revolve around what we were doing in the classroom, really showing that even if this is a virtual environment, a non-traditional classroom, the learning can be as meaningful and authentic as any place else. The ability to put pictures up, mess with them, type, and all that good stuff lended itself to my choice of doing a more in-depth 'discussion of one' on finding the area of triangles and parallelograms​

Process Again, this is another tool that I can see so much potential for. Ever teach a class where you wish you could just mute a few students? Done. Want to make sure a specific student has a voice, has the floor, and no one else? Wimba can do it. You can get your entire point across to the entire class, which they can then look over to form more appropriate questions. Then you can take the questions one at a time in an environment where everyone can sit and listen to the one person, see that question be responded to, and all can learn from it. It can also serve as a great review point with the archiving. Going back to look at everything that was just learned over the span of a ?-week course offers a great deal of ownership and responsibility to the learners in the group.

... Not to mention the fact that if you save it, nothing is stopping you from sharing it with your real-world classes to broaden their horizons with other's thoughts, as well.

Reflection The first thing I am going to go with is a negative. No matter how many times I recorded the session for my Wimba, it always... ALWAYS either zoomed in at some crazy point of the screen or cut off anywhere between 10% - 80% of what I was doing. Even below, on my really good run-through with it, the far-right side of the screen I was using was cut out. That needs to be fixed.

In addition to that, many of the things I would like to say will mirror my feelings toward Jing, at least in the respect that I hate being in a situation where I have to go on for some number of minutes, trying to make sure both what I am saying, and what I am doing match up. And me not messing up is a big part, too. Granted, I can put this one up there to being in a weird situation. Wimba is better when there's an actual class of participants, so the session would flow more naturally.

On the definitively positive side, with a good group of people to do it with, Wimba is an awesome tool for what it can do. Being able to gather everyone (students and teacher[s]) to a room to talk about an instructional video or PowerPoint slide, or maybe just tackle an issue people in the class are having, makes this tool very nice to have around.

Link/Artifact media type="file" key="WimbaClassEricWalter.m4v" width="300" height="300"