This week, I debuted my new class feature, "Weekly Webinars". Using Bridgit conferencing software that my district has I conducted a webinar for my students. Even though I only had one student join me, I felt the powerful interactiveness that can be lacking with screencasts. Below you'll see the presentation I gave. Just going through the slides highlights for me how making this more interactive is so important. I will be doing this a lot more and screencasting a lot less. Who knows, maybe in the near future I will have students hold the webinars and give the presentations they have made to the other students!
During the Webinar, I asked questions and through the chat feature the student was able to answer and get immediate feedback. Going forward, I am going to hold all my review sessions this way, rather than the traditional before and after school as I have for the past ten years. I will also be looking for a student to volunteer to moderate while I am presenting. I am so excited because this is the next progression of my classroom in a direction that I feel is actually away from "flipped learning". I want to create more of a partnership between myself and my students, one that I feel can be missing if I just say "watch this video". Recently I had the opportunity to hear renowned David Warlick speak. He started to help me understand that the entire landscape that we operate is changing dramatically, and that we constantly have to adjust our methods to engage technologically savvy students. I think that using Webinars with my students is more interactive, more like "Cracking" the digital experience as David puts it.