So How Did It Go?
Today I spent about 15 minutes of each class period teaching a mini-lesson on essay writing live over the Internet on our TN DEN Leadership Council’s Livestream page. I have to admit, it was sort of fun. One of our regular teachers was out, so the idea was to help teach her class for the day and then let kids work on editing their essays. As it turned out, I had several visitors from around the country, and the other two lab classes also tuned in at least one period on their own.
The technology worked great. Livestream is a great site to do this sort of work. I was using my Macbook Pro, but added a Logitech Pro 9000 webcam to the mix to get a little better video stream. The audio was clear, and the other classes could still see the pages I was using in my Promethean flip chart.
The difficulties came in being online a couple of minutes before the lesson actually started. In the embedded video below, the actual lesson starts 2 minutes into the video, so just go ahead and fast forward there if you choose to watch it. We also had a small problem when the office came over the intercom and asked for a student by name. The announcement was to tell that student to be a car rider. Obviously, I didn’t really want that information going out over the Internet. I wasn’t able to stop it on the live feed, but did delete that clip from the library. Finally, we had the wonderful experience of having a fire drill in the middle of one lesson. Oh yeah. It was fun.
You can see the lesson below. As I mentioned earlier, fast forward to 2 minutes in and you’ll see where we are starting. And if you dropped by today….thanks!