Our Class in Elluminate

Hello Everyone,

So, as most of you already know, our last class was not a traditional class in the classroom. Rather, we met online using software called Elluminate. For the most part, there was very little technical difficulties that effected our class. We did experience some "choppiness" with our Professor's audio, but I wouldn't say that it took away from the lesson.

I did not think that we would be able to accomplish in Elluminate what we accomplish in a traditional class session, but my assumptions were incorrect. We covered a lot of material and learned a few new things that will definitely be helpful tools to use in our classrooms one day. I think class was so successful because our Professor was able to stream her desktop live for us, just as she would've done on the smartboard in class.

I thought many interesting things happened in Elluminate that I wasn't expecting. I wasn't expecting for anyone to really be talking. I figured it would be a class in which we all communicated via typing to one another. I was pleasantly surprised to find that many people had microphones and could talk rather than type. I think this helped a lot because it cut down on the amount of people that were typing responses to questions at one time therefore making things much less complicated.

At the end of class, we were able to go off in our Unit Project Groups to work on our 2nd lesson plan. My group actually utilized a chatroom within Elluminate to accomplish this. This was another tool within Elluminate that I was not expecting. It worked really well for our group and communicating with one another was really simple. We didn't know how to get back into the class session with the entire class when it was time, but that was really the only drawback.

I do not know how Elluminate would work in other classes, but I would be really curious to see it used in a literature class which is mostly discussion based. I would think that it would be a little but chaotic with everyone speaking at once, but I would love to try it out.

Let me know what all of you think!

-Meaghan