This is one those of post that should have been done ages ago !!! As part the access to broadband project we have a license of Elluminate and one of the projects I'm doing is trailing virtual office hours in the evening with broadband communication. Which means one evening a week I'm online and in a Elluminate room and students can rock with problems and hopefully using the screen sharing feature of Elluminate I can demonstrate the solution to the problem or I can fix the problem on their machine. This helps towards solving one of my greatest headaches, which is often when students send me email messages about problems it that takes ages to figure what the problem is and then it takes quite a bit of time to write up the solution. Using software is a visual kinesthetic activity that doesn't translate well into email messages !!!
The screensharing feature of Elluminate is great. It's so simple to use, and that has been the key for this type of activity to work. It is slow even on a quite fast (1500mb) connection. The first session was great, I helped out on of our sessional teachers for and hour or so and then worked with a student for about 20 minutes. The level of concentrated needed was huge and because the sessions start at 9pm I was exhausted by the end !!! But I'm sure I will get used to it. It seems like the people at the other end where really pleased as well.
The last couple of sessions that have been timetabled I've managed to miss somehow, but I've got reminders in my diary now !!!!
Posted by robin at July 2, 2006 01:38 PM