Elluminate

This page is a ongoing dialog of Horseheads, Jamestown and Lancaster Teachers using Elluminate http://www.elluminate.com/ Elluminate, Inc. provides proven, best-in-class solutions for real-time **online learning** and **collaboration** that deliver exceptional outcomes, including **enhanced learning experiences**, increased retention and completion rates, and **higher ROI**. Elluminate has served more than 300 million web-collaboration minutes to over 3 million teachers and students located in **185 different countries**.

All, I invited a couple of students go on the site (http://grou.ps/digitalclassroom/) today to see if they found it easy to navigate and understand. I wanted to get a student perspective. If you see Kim or Emily there, they are my kids. I'll probably boot them as we tinker with the site, but I wanted feedback.

All the teachers who've been to the site have admin privileges. I'll be playing with look of the site this afternoon. Give feedback, please - ease of use, does it do what we want, etc. A test of elluminate next week sounds good if it works into a schedule when I have kids.

Jeff Kresge - Team Adeste, Persell Middle School, Jamestown, NY 14701 Friday March 13, 2009

Great news group, The Lancaster school district is investigating the purchase of Elluminate. The school year 2008 maybe the year we can break the 3 room problem. Our district wants a program that will allow multiple rooms to connect and would like to find one, if one exists that is better. Elluminate is the front runner Marc Rinow Wednesday March 11, 2009

Men,

A couple of notes from our live three-room test of Elluminate with kids this morning:

1) How was my sound aside from when I accidently left my microphone on? My kids were too shy to speak aloud. I've beaten on them since and if their broken jaws heal, they'll be more vocal next time.

2) I have pulled out an interwrite-type board from my "Random Tech Crap That I Don't Use" cabinet and it works great with Elluminate, so I'll be able to write and draw now on the program's white board without the mouse pad.

3) Lighting is an issue - The way our class is set up, our 8 foot screen in opposite the windows. If I have the camera on the kids, I need to draw the shades, making the room too dark for you to see us. Too many lights make the screen hard to see. I've already painted the front of my room dark blue to make the screen "pop." I'll have to do the side wall over spring break.

4) We need to speak loudly and slowly. At a regular pace, voice can be garbled. This stinks for me, too, Seamus!

5) Rinow's webcam looked really good in comparsion to what ever Seamus had. I was on a Canon ZR500 video camera mounted on a tripod with a SnowBall Microphone about three feet from me. The camera can zoom in and out and we can pan the room if needed.

6) Recording the sessions is going to be important as we move forward. It's going to be too complicated to juggle schedules around all day.

Jeff Kresge - Team Adeste, Persell Middle School, Jamestown, NY 14701

Homepage: http://www.jamestownpublicschools.org/persell/faculty/jkresge/Site/Welcome.html

Twitter Name: jkresge

Lost Neighborhood Project: http://www.jamestownpublicschools.org/persell/faculty/jkresge/Site_2/Lost_Neighborhood_Home.html

Vision for the Digital Class Project

Grade 8 - Vince LoTempio, Jason Schrage, Jason Kathman Grade 7 – Marc Rinow, Seamus McCarville, Jeff Kresge

1) Planning - The project should start with grade level meetings among interested teachers to determine schedules and curriculum alignment.

2) Tech Considerations - The educators need to determine a common blog/wiki/social networking site(s) to utilize for common assignments/projects. It is imperative that each site is able to access and use the chosen site.

3) Video Conferencing - For room to room/building to building video conferencing, a video conferencing site must be selected. [] works well.

4) All-Star Plan - Participants should create a unit plan ahead time. Each teacher should identify portions of the plan they could excel at and avoid areas in which they are weaker. This will result in the students getting the best possible unit instruction.

5) Collaboration - Ideally, students would be required to participate in groups with students from other schools in order to compete tasks/assignments, forcing interschool collaboration and discussion.

6) Asynchronous Learning - It should be noted that the students will not be in classes at the same time. This will necessitate asynchronous learning. To work around this issue, projects will need to be long term (perhaps a week). This will allow the students to work at their own pace when they are available to do so.

7) Connections - Entrenched in the learning should be some type of blog/wiki to encourage higher-level thinking, past to present time connections, and text to text connections. Learning should be encouraged between students by requiring them to post a comment and to comment to at least one (?) other student in a meaningful way. This should be a response to a student from another class/school/teacher to encourage inter-class learning.

8) Unit Product – Ideally, the culminating project for the unit would be web-based and incorporate work from students from multiple sites working cooperatively. This would allow for public sharing, peer evaluation and discussion. This product would be evaluated by a pre-established rubric.

9) Grading – Educators should have a pre-established rubric for each assignment. This should be posted prior to the beginning of the assignment so that students understand the expectations of the task. Each teacher will be responsible for evaluating his own students.