Last month it was a pleasure to attend and present at The E-Learning Consortium of Colorado Conference in Vail, Colorado. The conference is one of the best regional conferences providing opportunities for colleagues to share new techniques, delivery modes and technologies for teaching and learning in the classroom. Susan Herman and I had the added pleasure of presenting a new technology we have implemented in my classes and tutorials for Blackboard training on the student Early Alert Feature. Our joint session was presented using VoiceThread, an interactive technology for student interaction online. Instead of doing a welcome to this course power point I developed a VoiceThread introduction for my Interpersonal Communications and Humanities courses in which the syllabus and assignments were reviewed and each student had the opportunity to ask questions as well as introduce themselves on-line. I have provided the PowerPoint below for any interested in viewing the presentation. VoiceThread has provided many interactive opportunities for students, especially those who are attending the virtual campus courses. The session was so well received that The University of Denver has asked us to help them in training and guidance with VoiceThread technology. The opportunity to lead a webinar or face to face session for DU faculty is a possibility for the coming year.I also presented two other times at the conference with fellow Colorado Mountain College colleagues in a live performance of poetry and open house for Coloradoedu Island in Second Life. In the Second Life virtual presentations I was joined by Alice Bedard-Voorhees, Suzanne Thompson, and Margaret Maxwell. Despite technology problems with reliable Internet availability and a few wardrobe problems, (Alice kept losing her hair), it was a fun and exciting experience. Lindsey Royce was kind and brave enough to allow me to perform an oral interpretation of her poetry. Performing Lindsey’s poetry reminded me how appreciative I am of poets and their use of language and images through words and punctuation. Many years ago I performed poetry live with Actors Theatre of Louisville. One of my favorites was a tour that combined the poetry of e.e. cummings with several original poetry interpretations. I had forgotten how exciting it is to bring such focused work to life. We had a poet from Scotland arrive for the Second Life performance who shared his poetry as well, which I found to be very rewarding. He gave my avatar a line reader, which as the voice is interpreting the poetry the words flash across the screen. This is certainly nothing you have with real life poetry interpretations which makes it truly a multimedia experience.
The E-Learning Consortium Conference is one of those conference I will attend every year because of the learning, sharing and generally good time provided by the organizers and attendees. Plus, on top of all the learning, I won one of the trivia contests. I got lucky with questions that fell into one of my areas of expertise, a specialist in general information and mostly useless information!
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