Personal Learning with Virtual Conferencing

Personal learning with virtual conferencing

Gregor MacKenzie

Introduction

My name is Gregor MacKenzie. I work at Macquarie Fields TAFE in the Adult Basic Education Department. I do basically adult literacy—reading, writing, mathematics. My main program focus is with the youth programs.

What we have is a group that ranges from between 10 and 15 students in any one cohort that will come through. The course that they’re involved in within our section is a single semester course. They come from a wide range of backgrounds. We’re working with children from, or students from different cultural backgrounds. We usually have a percentage of Aboriginal students within the program, a number of students that are from Islander backgrounds as well, and also Anglo-Saxon. Their ages will range usually from about the 15 to 19 age bracket. They’re students who usually for some reason the school system hasn’t worked for them. They may have been victims of bullying, or they may have actually been perpetrators of bullying as well, and also students that are in financial dire straits as well, so we do have students that are homeless or have been engaged in the juvenile justice system as well.

Why I started using Adobe® Connect™ was that we were engaged in basically a trial across our Institute with Connect as an online conferencing tool. We started to look at applications that might be able to be utilised within the classroom environment. Of course, the first port of call as far as seeing whether it was going to work as a teaching and learning tool was to throw it open to the youth program because they have a bit of an affinity with technology. That was the start of it. What we found was that they very quickly got in tune with the program and how it works and we found that it was a huge motivational tool.

What we did with the Pinpower Ads as part of our literacy program for young people as well is about trying to make them more employable. Of course, one of the things that we cover in our literacy is getting students to engage with the Driver knowledge test as part of the RTA website, so we’ve utilised that a fair bit. A bit of an offshoot off that, if we’re going to encourage students to get their licence for the purpose of employability, is we also want them to be aware of safety issues and some of the statistics that, well, I think are fairly alarming in respect to young people and motor vehicles, so that’s why we decided to use the Pinpower Ads site which a colleague said to me go and have a look at it because it’s got some really good information.

So what we did was basically using Adobe® Connect™ as the virtual classroom, we put the links that we required for that lesson into Adobe® Connect™,which were the Pinpower Ads site and the RTA Driver Knowledge Test. We then uploaded a Word document into the virtual classroom so that the students would have resources to work on the actual website and the activity for this particular session was a comprehension-based activity whereby they had to look through the Pinpower Ads site to find out some of the statistics and some of the issues that are facing young drivers—drink driving, all those sorts and speeding, of course, being another issue. So when they first came into the room what they would see is they would see a notepad that would have their class instructions on it, a step-by-step set of instructions, they would have in the Word document that they needed to complete the activity and they would also have the links or the weblinks that would take them to the site where they could source the information that they needed to answer those questions. Once they’d completed that, what they had to do was actually save their document and they had to upload it into their Adobe® Connect™ room. So each student within that group actually had an Adobe® Connect™ room within that virtual classroom where they could store their assessment items.So that’s how we basically I guess collected evidence that students had participated and completed the activity as it was set.

How students used the virtual conference

The ways that they did interact in that particular session, there was of course the online, the utilisation of the audio-visual tools. We didn’t have webcams on but certainly students could communicate through speech with their teacher and also their peers, so they had headphones and mics. Of course, one of the aspects of that program is the chat section, which seems to be a tool of choice for young people, so if there were any questions flying around they were often coming in through the chat section. One aspect of that, too, is that it actually has the capacity to send private messages to either individual students or from an individual student to the teacher only.So what that allows students to do is really if they are having difficulty with an aspect of the lesson they can actually ask the teacher privately for help without having to appear in front of their friends and classmates as if they’re struggling, which is particularly when you’re working with students that lack confidence and haven’t had very positive educational experiences that can be a very powerful and useful tool.

The main benefit is the young people just seem to love the technology and the fact that they’re motivated towards using something is really good because it means that they’re automatically going to engage, and that was certainly what we found, was that as soon as we introduced this new tool to them they wanted to find out all about it and they wanted to play around with it, so to speak, but in playing around with it they were actually completing their activities and their assessments.

Of course, another aspect of it is that it also allowed students to go back in and complete things that they may not have had time to complete within that given session.So we left the classroom open for them so that if at another time when the session that was outside the actual teaching session they wanted to go back in and look over or review some work or add to something that they’d been working on, they were able to do that at their leisure as such.So we had students accessing it to work on projects outside what would be normally during TAFE hours.

Sometimes we would have a teacher off campus and students actually on campus working in a computer room, so the teacher was off campus delivering. Often it could be vice versa so that the teacher would be on campus or within their office environment and students would be accessing from their home environment or even local library or even the TAFE library or in some cases a mixture of all three, depending on what the student’s ability to access the internet was. It allows you and the student to have some flexibility and some control over when they’re actually going to complete their assignment.

One of the concerns that I had as a teacher introducing it to a class was how was I going to engage these students in it. It was a new thing and I wasn’t sure how I was going to go about that, particularly considering that my own experience with it was not excessive, so after thinking long and hard about it I just thought well, I’m just going to show them it and see what happens. I opened it up and got them into the virtual classroom. At this point in time we were all one group in one room and I opened up the whiteboard and I said, ‘Here you go, what do you think you can do with this?’ and within about probably 15 or 20 minutes the entire class was engaged in either using the chat box or drawing on the whiteboard. They even invented some of their own games, so I think like a lot of technology is nowadays, and things are expanding so rapidly, that I think there’s a whole different range of actual learning techniques that we need to think about applying, and when you look at the younger people and the way they will go about actually learning a piece of technology, it’s vastly different to what we would consider traditional methods of learning.

The types of learning that it’s suited for, we’re just beginning to scratch the surface, and look I think the application is extremely broad. I think we could just about cover any area with it. I guess if you think of it in terms of the way that I came to think of it when using it in the classroom situation was that it was the virtual classroom and I was just going to pack it with resources for whatever I wanted to do with those students at that given time, whether that be a job-seeking activity or whether that be literacy, numeracy, whatever, it didn’t really matter because it was a classroom. I guess what we’re doing is we’re creating easier access to the information for those students via that classroom environment.

In making sure that things run smoothly within that classroom environment, it’s very, very similar to what you would be doing in your normal classroom environment. If I’m getting ready to teach a class and it’s going to require a DVD player and a TV and a whiteboard, and other bits and pieces of material, then before I actually go into that classroom I will check that the DVD player is in there and that it’s working, that my DVD itself works, that the computers are working and have internet access and that my whiteboard marker is going OK as well. It’s pretty much exactly the same thing when you put together a classroom for an online environment like that. You pack it out with what you wish to use in that, within that classroom context, and then before you drag the students in there and get them engaged in the process you actually go through and check to make sure that all your materials are working, and that’s pretty much the process that you would go through in any I guess any teaching situation.

You’ve got a class attendance sheet just in Adobe® Connect™ itself, because one of the pods that will come up, and we always have up whenever we’re running a session like that, is an attendees list, so as the students come into the rooms their name will actually appear.

The technology of virtual conferencing

My technological proficiency – I would sort of consider myself around average. I access the internet and utilise email as a preferred form of communication within the workplace environment. As far as using tools like Adobe® Connect™, Adobe® Connect™ was the first sort of online conferencing tool that I’d ever really engaged in. It probably took me about six sessions before I felt I had my head around it, so what we were doing when we were first learning how to use Adobe® Connect™ was that we engaged in a staff training and development activity where people across our Institute would actually meet on a Thursday afternoon for about 45 minutes online using Adobe® Connect™ and share ideas and experiences and talk about what we’d discovered in fiddling around with Connect. So you’re probably looking at about I would say 4-5 hours of playing around with it before I was confident to actually use it in the classroom.

We had situations where students had difficulty accessing the internet at any given time as well, so I mean there are times when you are going to have those difficulties. I guess one advantage is in keeping the classroom open for them to access if they don’t make it at any set time. The disadvantage of course in coming in is you don’t have the teacher support there but they still have access to the activities and the class notes, if you want to use those.

The only problem that we did have occasionally was somebody’s microphone wasn’t working so they weren’t able to actually communicate verbally. Of course, the beauty of the program itself is that it does have other communication tools such as the chat box, so if an aspect of your technology like that failed then you could always still communicate with the teachers and other students, but yes, it was really reliable in actual fact; far more reliable than some other things that you might be doing across the web, I guess.

Strategies that we would have employed if that had been the case would have been we also set up earlier on in the program email groups for the students, so we communicate with the students via email as well, so it would have just been a matter of unpacking the Adobe® Connect™ classroom, whacking it into a group email and sending it off, and they would have had access to it.