Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Reflection on Jen Wagner's Presentation: Webcasting for Educators

Even though I've had to explain to my wife why I was going to the computer to watch "Women of Web 2.0" live webcast at 9:00pm on Tuesday nights, I've found the explanation well worth the time. I have enjoyed sitting in on a few of the shows over the past 12 months and have found them to be most interesting. The guests they get are always top notch and the hosts (Cheryl Oakes, Jen Wagner, Vicki Davis, and Sharon Peters) do a great job of moderating the discussion and bringing in the conversations from the chatroom. I had the distinct pleasure of actually being around for their only live webcast done face to face at NECC last summer.

It was great to see more of the behind the scenes work that is done to make this show so successful in their K12 Online Conference presentation. The discussion and demonstration of the tools that are used in the background to keep the show organized and running smoothly was of tremendous use. The tools most commonly used by the group are:

These are tools commonly used in education already. This means one thing - more teachers and students could be doing this sort of work.

I had done some webcasting 6 years ago while I was working at Lake Region Middle School using a Macintosh OS X Streaming Server and Live Channel Pro software to stream student presentations. Now tools like UStream.tv bring similar functionality to any desktop for free. I hope to assist some of our students in doing a student led show. Last month WOW2 did a show featuring Alice Barr, Kern Kelley, and some of their students. Several of the students really enjoyed being on the show and would like to start a show of their own. I'd like to be part of helping this happen.

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Image Attribution:
Image: 'WOW_3'
www.flickr.com/photos/20819183@N00/638263760

1 comment:

Cheryloakes50 said...

Hi Mike,
This reflection is really great. I hope you do get to work with the students to make them prosumers and creators. That was one of my favorite shows with your Yarmouth students and the Newport students, it is great to be part of making connections.
Cheryl