Reflection on using Elluminate

Last week I facilitated a session for fellow staff which was an "Introduction to Blogging and RSS" This was using the AFL Elluminate Virtual Office on the Learning Times Australia. Over a period of two hours we covered:
- what a blog is
- read some blogs
- set up individual blogs on edublogs.org and made some initial postings
- looked briefly at images and categories
- had a brief look at RSS and set up Bloglines accounts
- in addition I talked a bit (not well enough) about how these tools can be used in an educational context.

Having survived running my first Elluminate session there are some changes next time.
- explain the tick/cross tool for feedback to the presenter
- encourage use of the whiteboard and insert more blank slides in the presentation for this
- talk more about why I selected edublogs as the free blog hosting service.
- reconsider how the RSS section could be presented - perhaps this should just be a show and tell section rather than people setting up Bloglines account as we ran out of time to do it justice. As you can do so much with RSS it seems crazy to have touched on just aggregators.
- ask all participants to load a browser window with the one-page handout that contains all the links. perhaps suggest it is added as a bookmark for easy navigation back to it.
- make digital versions of the 'network' graphic I drew on the whiteboard in the f2f session.

Some specific questions about Elluminate I need to answer before Thursday:
1. once a webtour is launched, can participants click on links and control it themselves? Does it have normal controls eg address bar etc (I think not but need to check)
2. a way for showing .swf files - using the webtour loading the html page that has the .swf embedded didn't seem to work but maybe it was a bandwidth issue.

All in all it was a great experience - I felt drained at the end of it but very pleased I survived (in no small part thanks to Robin for acting as tech support for those having 'fun' with their equipment)

Update (Tues 22 Nov):
Thanks to Marcus (one of the participants) for some feedback on the session on his blog at http://mwynwood.com/blog/. Neat to see the social aspects of blogging happening and also confirming some of the changes I would like to make to the session.

Let's see how Thursday pans out!!!