Edited by Dave Edwards, Wednesday 10 April 2013 at 22:03
In spite of the advance request to these S282 astronomy students for them to have the DVD images available for the session about four of the twenty participants did not.
At the start of the images activity we asked students to open up the images on their machines, and to provide a tick on Elluminate when they had done that. It took a few minutes for this to be completed, and it was not entirely clear if some students had achieved this or not. Some of these students seemed to be finding using Elluminate difficult.
To cater for these students we put them together in one breakout room and Anne provided the images via Elluminate's application sharing feature. However this left Anne trapped n the breakout room, and the amount of discussion between these students was low.
I went though the other break out rooms to check that they had understood the task and that they were engaging with it and with each other. This seemed to be the case.
We had allowed 10 minutes for the individual breakout room discussions, but for me to get around the four rooms took all of this time.
We also had planned two breakout room activities in this part of the tutorial - however it was clear that we were running rather behind schedule. We opted to skip the second activity and move straight to the TMA discussion. A break out activity had been planned here as well. This was also skipped in favour of asking students to type responses directly onto the appropriate whiteboard. This worked well.
At the end of the session we posted copies of the PowerPoint material to our Tutor Group Forums.
S282 'Astronomy' Elluminate session in practice
At the start of the images activity we asked students to open up the images on their machines, and to provide a tick on Elluminate when they had done that. It took a few minutes for this to be completed, and it was not entirely clear if some students had achieved this or not. Some of these students seemed to be finding using Elluminate difficult.
To cater for these students we put them together in one breakout room and Anne provided the images via Elluminate's application sharing feature. However this left Anne trapped n the breakout room, and the amount of discussion between these students was low.
I went though the other break out rooms to check that they had understood the task and that they were engaging with it and with each other. This seemed to be the case.
We had allowed 10 minutes for the individual breakout room discussions, but for me to get around the four rooms took all of this time.
We also had planned two breakout room activities in this part of the tutorial - however it was clear that we were running rather behind schedule. We opted to skip the second activity and move straight to the TMA discussion. A break out activity had been planned here as well. This was also skipped in favour of asking students to type responses directly onto the appropriate whiteboard. This worked well.
At the end of the session we posted copies of the PowerPoint material to our Tutor Group Forums.