Virtual Participants welcome and information - Flat Classroom Conference 2013

[Julie Lindsay]

Taken by Alan Levine - It's meant to be me welcoming everyone to the conference

Welcome everyone! A special welcome also to our virtual participants at the Flat Classroom Conference 2013!

Day 1 of the conference was busy (of course!) with student teams and teachers teams developing their concepts and pitching them for feedback. We had four inspirational mini-presentations from NGO representatives who were involved in the Japan tsunami aftermath. This generated lots of ideas for action projects.

Being a virtual participant is HARD work! We know this! We are breaking new ground in this area in so many ways. The conference goes by so quickly and we know some of you are finding it difficult to connect with your teams - or to even know what team you are on. Here are EASY steps to get the most out of being virtual!

1. Make sure you have completed the online form that asked for further details about you so we can add you to a team
2. Review all submissions here
3. We will then add you to a team - Leaders/Teachers or Students
4. Find Student teams on the wiki
5. Your team members will reach out to you via the Ning - but YOU should also search for them!  How???
   • Join the backchannel and chat with others
   • Use the Ning chat and see who is online and do a public or private chat - also search for people via Members
   • Go into Blackboard (during conference hours) and ask for help from Anne or Jason
   • Watch the wiki homepage for daily updates to the program and be aware we are GMT+9 timezone
   • Watch the streamed video - we have a very young student tech team doing a great job here - please realise ustream can be a little inconsistent

So what should you be doing as a virtual participant??

• Leadership strand
• Student strand

Review the action projects and follow links to material on the wiki. You can help with building the team action project - helping to find resources, creating media etc.

Write a blog post! - We would love to hear from you! We want to hear your thoughts about connecting virtually - what worked, what didn't, how successful you were in real time or asynchronously. We want to hear about what you are doing already to connect your classroomn - share some things about yourself so your team members and all of us can get to know you better! That goes for real as well as virtual.

Thanks to Bart (virtual), Nathan (virtual) and others who have started to blog about the event.

ok, here we go into Day 2 in Japan - It's going to be busy! See you all online!

Don't forget to follow #flatclass2013 on Twitter!!

Julie

 

 

 

[Anne Mirtschin]

Thanks Julie for all this great advice. I would like to reinforce that one of the best places to be is in the  backchannel where most virtuals are and the Blackboard Collaborate room Also ask if there is anything you can do on twitter, or ask questions on twitter about how the conference is looking or going etc. Face to face groups will be intent on getting their work done but hopefully someone will be online and looking for the requests from the virtuals. Just watching the ustreams when they are available is really enlightening.