Week two of First ELFADA Pilot completed
Introduction
A short week this week due to the Public Holiday on Monday. This meant we had an awful lot to do to keep on schedule! The students worked brilliantly all week. As expected everyone is now at different stages with respect to completion of tasks. We have one student who has more or less dropped out due to Internet problems and a second who has been unable to attend consistently for personal reasons.
The week reviewed!
This week was a look at online safety through reviewing a variety of visual and audio-visual texts, posting a review of one of the videos and then making and posting a visual text on online safety using ToonDoo. For easy access to a limited collection of links we used a Symbaloo page. This has links addressing online safety issues with different coloured tiles for different visual/audio visual text types. The course blog was also updated with posts relating to the week’s activities.
Those students and lecturers for our first pilot ELFADA course who were online during the virtual class session on visual texts made a Toon together we did this through desktop sharing with each person taking turns to control my desktop and add their own choice of character and text. For me it illustrates the level of motivation of this group of students that one of them attended this session while travelling as a passenger in a car!
Being able to record sessions and make them available if a student misses one is a huge advantage. Obviously watching a recording is far less interesting that actually being in a session but for students who have had to miss sessions it is better than nothing. This has happened a couple of times and enables the student to catch up flexibly.
Next week
Next week our third lecturer who has joined us several times to get to know the students will be dong sessions onresizing images for blogs and other online purposes and on making and embedding Vokis.
I also admit to some trepidation about next week as we will be visited “really” rather than “virtually” by a PfP manager. I know I shouldn’t be worried but there is always that slightly scary feeling when those who manage funding come to visit!
Conclusion
Although some students are a little behind on completion of work this is not surprising given the range of the group (from Cert I,Cert II and Cert III) and the diversity of computer systems in use that have caused occasional technical glitches. These have sometimes necessitated longish troubleshooting sessions using desktop sharing to view student configurations. We have also had one Public Holiday and another to come in the last week which hasn’t helped. However the program is heavily “front-end loaded” to allow for catch-up time in the last week (week four). There will be nothing new introduced after the middle of next week (week three).
