Week 9 - Marina and Eve

Marina and Eve chose to facilitate a great session on "SMARTing" your goals. This was content they have co-delivered many times in a classroom so the challenge was to transfer the content into a virtual conference room. It was really interesting watching how they worked together to present the information - one person presenting, and the other keeping track of text and managing the whiteboard. I thought it was a great demonstration of how helpful it is if you are lucky enough to have a co-presenter. One delivering the content and the other watching the text - then they swapped.

They sent an email before the session asking us to think about our goals - so we knew what was coming and were ready to participate in the session. The first slide was a couple of questions to establish what they group knew about goal-setting. The was a good starting point because it engaged everyone in the group immediately. Other activities involved us thinking quietly about our response - in a classroom it might be a short paired discussion before feeding back to the large group. This felt strange to me in an online environment, sitting silently thinking. It may be an idea to ask the questions first of those who have more knowledge. Others can then consider their response while this is happening and this would eliminate the silence.

Marina asked for a volunteer to offer a goal and then as group we SMART the goal. This seemed to be successful. I was concerned about whether other participants would stay focused on the activity as it revolved around one person. Generally the feedback was that that people did stay focused and people were contributing to the discussion through text and voice unasked.

Marina and Eve have both said that as a result of Denis' presentation and their own facilitation they can see opportunities to use this technology in their practice - which is great!

The forum this week has been hopping! Liz and Ken were facilitating. Liz came up with idea of having a Twitter in our forum just to see what it's all about - and twitter we did! The result was that 75% of the group contributed and there were the most posts in any discussion. So the lesson for me? Encourage short and sweet contributions and people will give it a go! Thanks Liz.