There were a total of 13 web conferences for this course. These conferences provide a method for students to ask questions and have assignments clarified. They also provide a method for the professors to evaluate the courseware and make updates as needed to provide more clarity or address any confusion that has occurred.
Week 1 Web Conference - Monday, June 4, 2012
There was a lot of discussion about having the correct assignments for Week 1. There seems to be some problems with the correct assignments showing up in Epic. My particular section in Epic has the correct assignment but the Readings are wrong. Under the Readings section, there are still 7 readings listed and a progress monitor. This is not correct for the current course. The syllabus has the correct readings listed. Dr Abernathy indicated that Lamar was moving from Epic to Blackboard beginning in August. This course has been updated from the previous sections and it seems that all the changes were not imported by Epic into the current courseware. Dr Abernathy made us all feel very welcome and emphasized that she was there to answer all our questions and help us in any way possible.
Week 2 Web Conference – Saturday, June 9, 2012
Dr Abernathy discussed Week 1 to ensure that everybody understood and completed the assignments. There were questions about how to submit certain assignments because some of the assignments had instructions but no actual place for you to add your responses. Most students seemed to either add a textbox to the end of the assignment page or to submit all responses on a separate web document. We will be using Audacity for audio recordings and we are to select a video editing program to explore. We can use Audacity to create a podcast that gives a brief explanation of our chosen video editing software. Dr Abernathy clarified the assignments to turn in for the week and then briefly talked about upcoming weeks. We should have a Google Site to post some of our work in this course. Most students already have a Google Site that was created in a previous course but there is a tutorial in resources with instructions on creating a Google Site. The procedure for obtaining an embed code was discussed so that our created video can be embedded on our Google Site. The code should be copied and pasted into our site. Dr. Abernathy reminded us that we are problem solvers. We can easily obtain a tutorial for any subject by using Google and searching for the desired subject and the word tutorial. Dr Abernathy provided a link to her blog (http://kayabernathy.blogspot.com) that contains helpful information. It is important for us to realize that we will be posting on the web for this course which should make us more comfortable sharing information on the web that would benefit our students or peers. There is always the possibility of problems when information is placed on the internet but these have been reduced by being well informed on the workings of the internet and the options available for sharing information.
The issues with having the wrong files in Epic were again discussed. Corrections were supposed to have been made but some students indicated that they were still seeing assignments with the wrong information.
Week 5 Web Conference – Sunday, July 01, 2012
As we end Week 4 and enter Week 5, there was discussion on week 4 and 5 assignments. This was a time that clarifications were made on both weeks. Dr Abernathy loaded the Week 5 Overview and this has the most updated and correct information for the course. In essence we are resubmitting many of the same parts as in previous two weeks but we have now completed all revisions. My team has used Dropbox and GoogleDocs to collaborate on this project. These have been invaluable in maintaining collaborative documents that are easily assessable to the entire team.
An update on our Action Research Project and our internship hours are due in this course. This is a good time for us to step back and access our progress on both of these requirements. It is very helpful that we have the flexibility to change the research project if our situation has changed. It is very important to be able to conduct research on a topic you are interested in and that is pertinent to you.
This was the first time I had received information on taking the principal’s exam. It was very comforting to hear that we will be required to take weekly practice exams until we are able to achieve a certain score. This will occur during one of the future courses.
There still seem to be issues with the course in Epic but we are receiving weekly overviews with the correct information and these web conferences are invaluable. Dr. Abernathy has provided the most flexibility with web conferences of any course I have taken. This has been a great asset for our learning.
This information is also posted on my Google Site:
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