Building A Free Virtual Conference For K-16 Schools

A Guide To Building a Free Virtual Conference for K-16 Schools
By Liz Kolb, Ph.D. Clinical Assistant Professor University of Michigan 2013
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction........................................................................................................ 3 Chapter 2: Why Virtual Conference for Professional Development...................... 5 Chapter 3: Conference Beginnings..................................................................................13 Chapter 4: Evaluating Virtual Conference Tools........................................................16 Chapter 5: A Website to Call home..................................................................................37 Chapter 6: Funding the Conference................................................................................56 Chapter 7: Marketing the Conference............................................................................62 Chapter 8: Presenter Preparation ..................................................................................66 Chapter 9: Participant Preparation................................................................................77 Chapter 10: Evaluating Year 1 of the Conference ......................................................79 Chapter 11: Mistakes and Mishaps.................................................................................90 Chapter 12: Year 2 Modifications and Additions .......................................................94 Chapter 13: Future Plans ................................................................................................ 102 References ............................................................................................................................ 106

Chapter 1: Introduction I have been an education technology instructor at the University of Michigan for over a decade. Each year around 200 students graduate from our teacher training program. A strong conviction of Michigans teacher education program has been that the education should not stop once the students graduate, yet for the most part it did. Back in 2008 our teacher education program was using a variety of random methods to stay connected with the schools alumni. Some instructors had email lists (where some of the email links were out of date), others had social networking sites such as Facebook or Ning group pages (often different pages for each program), yahoo list groups, and random Twitter feeds, just to name a few. There was not a centralized space for alumni to reconnect or extend their learning through our University. Of course there were a few former students connecting casually with professors, but in general there was no consistent formal or even informal space for continuing education. The faculty and staff would often talk about wanting to create more professional development and mentoring opportunities for the alumni, but nothing ever panned out. Then in 2008 I had three professional experiences that gave me an inspiration for potentially solving this concern of continuing education for our alumni. My first inspiration came when I attended a face-to-face conference in Texas, where Dr. Lisa Dawley from Boisie State, spoke about virtual teaching and the amazing growth over the past decade. I was blown away by the growth, excitement and potential of virtual learning tools. She explained that the state of Idaho had even developed a virtual teaching certification as a result of the growth. My second experience came soon after this Texas conference, when I was asked to develop an asynchronous presentation for the K12 Online Conference. I had not heard of the K12 Online Conference and began to learn all about it. It was an asynchronous conference made up of short (15 to 60 minute) recorded presentations around education technology. Participation was free and the participants could watch the recordings at their leisure and post comments. While I enjoyed the K12 Online experience (in particular the free participation), I felt it could really benefit from some synchronous interaction. In particular being able to ask presenters questions live during the presentation and network in real-time with other participants. Finally, I attended an education technology conference at Michigan State University in the Fall of 2008. The conference brought numerous Michigan State University School of Education alumni back to campus. It provided rich sessions on education technology for pre-service and in-service teachers. In addition many of the students in the education school helped to run the conference. It was a great networking opportunity for these students. In 2008, the University of Michigan did not have any large-scale way to provide annual professional development for their alumni, and many of Michigans school of education alumni were teaching all over the world and would not be able to travel back to campus for an education technology conference. In addition, many face-to-face conferences have a cost that some teachers just cannot afford. Then an idea began to form 3
The Idea These three experiences and the need for alumni professional development opportunities gave me an idea. Why not develop a synchronous multi-day virtual conference focusing on education technology? Knowing that most school districts cannot afford to send all of their teachers to attend the many face-to-face conferences on education technology (between hotel rooms, flights, and conference fees they tend to cost around $1,000.00 or more to attend a conference), this virtual conference could be low cost or even free for attendees. With a free virtual conference, all teachers would have access to the information without having to worry about the cost. Furthermore, many educators do not want to spend time away from their families by traveling to a conference. In addition, the conference would be a way to give on-going annual professional development opportunities to the University of Michigan schools alumni in the challenging and growing field of education technologies where they would need continuous up-to-date training over time. Furthermore, it would be easier to entice educators from all over the world to present at the conference since they would not have to leave their house in order to present. Thus the development of the 4T Virtual Conference began! This book is the story of how a grassroots virtual conference was developed with zero funding. It is meant to be a model for K12 school districts or universities interested in developing their own virtual conference within their district or one that couples with other school districts. The story documents the steps in developing the conference, the variety of resources used in creating the conference, the what worked and what did not work lessons learned. The conference began in 2010 and this book covers the first two years of the conference. The first (2010- 2011) and second (2011-2012) years are both highlighted in this book. The book explains changes from year 1 to year 2 as well plans for the future of the conference. In developing the conference, I focused heavily on free options so that any K12 school district could utilize professional development virtual conferences without budgetary concern.
Chapter 2: Why a Virtual Conference as Professional Development? This chapter will highlight current research and thought around traditional and virtual K12 professional development. In particular problems with K12 face-to-face professional development and how virtual professional development can be a solution for some of the current issues with face-to-face professional development. The ultimate goal of schooling is for children to learn. Education experts understand that that student achievement is the product of formal study by educators. (Joyce & Showers, 2002). Therefore, teachers must continually be updating their skills and knowledge about teaching and learning. Within the traditional K12 school structure it is difficult for teachers and school districts to find time and space for quality professional development. In 1999, 80% of teachers have reported that they need more time to collaborate with other teachers and learn new skills (Odden, 2000). These numbers have changed very little over the last decade. Yet, teachers are so busy teaching that they have little time left for their own learning. Therefore the majority of school districts resort to one-time workshops or lectures on designated professional development days during the school year. However, research has shown that these one-time professional development events are not typically aligned with ongoing practice, and do not lead to changes in classroom teaching (Loucks-Horsley & Matsumoto, 1999). Traditional professional development for K12 educators can be problematic. Below is a brief overview of some of the problems with face-to-face professional development. Current Concerns with Professional Development for Teachers Cost Face-To-Face professional development has been occurring in school districts for decades. The majority of school districts pay fees to bring in speakers and presenters to conduct workshops. The speaker fees can be hefty and often does not result in any changes of instruction or long-term growth (Loucks-Horsley & Matsumoto, 1999). In addition, schools encourage their employees to seek professional development opportunities at places outside of the school district such as local universities, education organizations, education conferences, and other vendor sponsored workshops. Most of these opportunities cost money. While the more affluent school districts may pay for some or even all of the professional development fees, many cannot. Thus it leaves the teachers to pay for the learning opportunities. Many teachers cannot easily afford to attend the national or international conferences, or expensive workshops. Most of these experiences include travel, food and hotel fees. Events Not Process Most of the outside workshops or speakers that school districts bring in for professional development are a one-time event. There are little to no plans to continue the learning by systemically sustaining the learning over long periods of time. It is often cost and time prohibitive to sustain any professional growth. While
research stresses that professional development must be a process, it is difficult for schools to find the time (and money) to allow this to happen for their teachers. Majority Rules Often related to factors of time and cost, most school districts choose face-to-face professional development opportunities that meet the needs of the general majority of their teachers and fits within their budget. Ultimately this means that the professional development offered might not apply to some teachers in the district. Thus, there tends to be a generic factor to the development that leaves some teachers unable to relate to the content presented. Lack of Community If teachers have an interest in a field or tool where there is no professional development offered in-district, they may feel isolated in their professional development pursuits. If they attend a workshop or lecture outside of the school district, they are often lacking a sense of professional community that they can learn, share, and grow with over time. While more affluent school districts can pay for their teachers to be part of education organizations and communities to keep them up to date on the latest innovations and research, many less affluent school districts cannot. Leaving the teachers to find their own professional learning communities. Effective Professional Development While there are plenty of face-to-face professional development opportunities for teachers, successful teacher development is a process and not a one-time episode (Joyce & Showers 2002). Most of the current models focus on a one-time episode rather than sustained learning over time. Researchers have found that teachers need to learn in and from practice (Ball & Cohen, 1999). By Learning from practice it allows other important components of effective professional development to occur such as collaboration and sustained learning over time. Researchers have found that with the characteristics listed below in place, teachers are more likely to consider the professional development relevant and ultimately makes improved teaching practice more likely (Hunzicker, 2011). In addition, it is often easier to sustain this type of growth. Below are some of the highlights found in research concerning characteristics of high-quality professional development. Characteristics of high-quality professional development: A Sense of Community Administrator support and buy in Teachers support the changes that may take place as a result of the professional development. They need to want to seek out the information and believe that it can improve their teaching and ultimately student learning. A sense of community occurs during the professional development Teachers get to interact and collaborate together 6
Teachers support one-another Practical, Contextual and Transferrable Supportive coaching and professional community that does not end but can be continuous so teachers maintain access to the community Deepen teachers knowledge of the subjects being taught Sharpen teaching skills in the classroom Keep up with developments in the individual fields, and in education generally Generate and contribute new knowledge to the profession Increase the ability to monitor students work, in order to provide constructive feedback to students and appropriately redirect teaching (The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century, 2000). Extended period of Time Supports interaction among master teachers Professional development is On-going and takes place over an extended period of time Provides opportunities for teachers to try new behaviors in safe environments and receive feedback from peers How virtual conferences can solve some of the complexities of professional development. It is difficult for one-time face-to-face professional development events to be sustained and allow for constant collaboration and building of a community network to support and construct new understandings over time. Knowing this to be true, virtual professional development may be one potential solution to the problems of face-to-face professional development for teachers. Considering Asynchronous Versus Synchronous Some educators have speculated that given the current technology it is possible to create virtual collaborative professional development learning schools (Harwell, 2003). Yet most of the virtual professional development that has arisen is asynchronous (such as the K12 Online Conference mentioned in the introduction). While there are some benefits from asynchronous interactions (e.gteachers can log in on their own time to learn and there is often a digital archive of discussions and activities), there are also some drawbacks. Some of the drawbacks include: 1) It is impersonal and often educators say they lack a sense of community. 2) Not being able to ask questions in the moment 3) Not being able to try collaboratively work on activities as they are being demonstrated 4) Harder to form a community of learners when they cannot interact live online
5) There is no flexibility in the experience (being able to segway from the main lecture). For example if you wanted to ask a question of the presenter and have them demonstrate a feature of the learning tool. Many of these drawbacks are also problematic in face-to-face professional development, in particular the lack of community. As mentioned in the introduction, one of the inspirations for this conference came from a free an asynchronous K12 conference experience (K12 Online). As mentioned, while I enjoyed the archived sessions, I felt disconnected and isolated from my peers who were attending the conference since there were no options to participate in a synchronous way. For many years, asynchronous was the easiest and most often selected option for online learning, however, with the increase in bandwidth, options for online synchronous learning environments have opened up (Hrastinski, 2008). Therefore, for my virtual conference, I wanted to make sure it had a synchronous approach. Considering that both approaches have benefits and drawbacks, I thought it was important to highlight both of these in this chapter. Below is a comparison table from Stefan Hrastinskis (2008) study of the two environments, where Hrastinski highlights which environment has larger gains in for professional development.
Asynchronous Ability for participants to process information being presented Spend more time in discussion boards and chat room with contentrelated discourse Focus more on quality of response rather than quantity Rich discussions with fewer participants Supports many types of communication Increases in motivation More likely to have social support exchanges Resembles face-to-face communication More likely to respond to messages and to be motivated to engage in chat Synchronous
X X X X X X X X X
Hrastinski (2008) concludes his study by giving examples of when and why one should use one environment over the other. Ultimately stating that a synchronous environment is best for getting acquainted, discussing both less or more complex issues, gaining motivation and commitment from participants, and planning and 8
doing tasks. While he found that an asynchronous environment is best only for reflecting on a complex issue. While some of the education technology topics in the conference may be more complex, I thought it would be unlikely that participants would return often to a static discussion board or email list to thoughtfully post about a topic. Rather it seemed more likely that they would be motivated by the possible real time collaboration of a virtual room that mimics face-to-face learning experiences. In addition, I found that there were other unique benefits to synchronous online learning. By and large there are greater benefits from a synchronous approach. The following are some benefits of synchronous online learning mentioned by virtual teaching instructors: Similar to Classroom Experience Since participants can ask questions of the presenter in real time, chat with other participants, work collaboratively to build knowledge and view each other live on webcams, it gives the participants more of a feeling of a face-to-face classroom experience. Therefore, this conference could connect to the K12 teachers familiarity of a traditional classroom experience through the virtual synchronous classroom. Flexibility While an asynchronous experience is a modular approach, where the presenter cannot easily stray from the presentation, a synchronous approach allows for the presenter to take the individual participants needs into consideration. For example, if a participant asks a question about how to do something in the presentation, the instructor could stop presenting and take a few minutes to show the participants how to do that activity. In an asynchronous presentation, the instructor could not immediately answer questions. Collaboration In an asynchronous learning environment, there is little to no room for real time collaboration or knowledge building. In a synchronous presentation, participants can work together to build ideas, brainstorm, and collaborate on a project. Networking Since there is little time to do real time chatting or collaborative amongst participants in an asynchronous environment, networking rarely occurs. In synchronous environments participants can exchange contact information in real time and continue their collaboration on their own time. Level SES One hidden gem of synchronous learning is that it can bridge the socio-economic issues that tend to create divisions in traditional learning. Often participants are unaware of other participants socio-economic backgrounds and by using the many collaborative features of an online environment, the participants can become more or less equal on the playing field. This is a nice feature for schools that are considering virtual professional conferences for their parents and community where they may have a range of parents with socio-economic status. The parents 9
can participate, ask questions without assumptions being made about how they dress, what they look like, or the car they drive. In addition the flexibiligy in scheduling virtual times can appeal to differing working hours for parents or community members and presenters. A synchronous virtual conference has the potential to do the following After researching synchronous and asynchronous online learning, I found that synchronous learning had the potential to solve some of the problems of traditional face-to-face professional development for K12 teachers. The following could be true of a synchronous online conference for K12 teachers. 1) Develop a community of learners a. Participants are live. They have dialogue with the presenters and network with other participants. b. In virtual rooms, participants can private message presenters and participants live and receive immediate response. c. Participants can add or extend the information being presented (eg...offering other resources that may meet the same goals or giving an anecdote about a situation in their classroom). d. Participants do not feel as isolated, in particular if they do not have teachers in their current school in the same field of interest (such as the lone music teacher in the school) e. One eager participant cannot as easily dominate the discussion (which could turn off or frustrate others in the session), the virtual environment can control for this with private messages and moderating. 2) On-going professional development at your own pace a. All the sessions can be archived, thus the participants can download the sessions anytime and watch them at their own pace. b. Time is not a limitation in the virtual world 3) Authenticity a. If the conference focuses on K-12 teachers and educators sharing their K-12 experiences, then there is potential to allow each session to be authentic and real-world, rather than hypothetical what ifs that often happen in event-type professional development. b. Participants can ask presenters, how did you deal with x? or why didnt you choose x instead? Presenters can answer from their K-12 experiences with the projects at hand. 4) Low to No Cost a. There are numerous free or low cost virtual learning spaces online. This allows teachers in districts with little professional development funds to still participate in on-going professional development. 5) Express Yourself a. Teachers who may hang back in a face-to-face professional development experience can express themselves more easily in an online format. They are more willing to ask questions and participate
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How I set up my virtual conference to combat the problems of professional development and emphasize the benefits Understanding the problems of face-to-face professional development, it was important that I set up the virtual conference to maximize the potential professional learning opportunities for the participating educators. The following are some steps we took to make sure that we were meeting the professional development needs of our participants. No Cost It was vital that the conference did not have any cost for the participants, this included continuing education credits. Therefore any educator in any school district could virtually attend without having to worry about funding. In fact, schools could send their entire district to the conference at no cost and receive state continuing education credits for attending the conference. Continuing Education Credits While there are some online conferences that are free, none of them offer free CEUs. By offering the CEUs it allowed the teachers to get credit for the conference in their school districts. For our first year we decided to offer .5 credits (a total of 5 one hour sessions) to any educator who was interested. For our second year we were able to offer up to 2.0 credits (a total o 20 one hour sessions). Opportunities for Collaboration Since each session was live, there were opportunities in every session for chat-room dialogue and private messaging. In addition, we had open rooms where participants could continue discussions, share resources, and network on their own time. Furthermore, we included a hash tag so that participants could social network via Twitter, Facebook and other networks about the conference. They could have a backchannel discussion (such as private messages back and forth between individual participants) and share resources during the conference. Presentations by in-service teachers Instead of an expert researcher or Ph.D (who may have never taught k-12) coming to speak to the school, our conference focused on teachers teaching other teachers based on their own classroom experiences. This allowed for authenticity and for the complexities of education technology in K-12 classrooms to come to the surface. In addition, it creates an atmosphere of we are all in it together rather than a big name telling teachers what to do or how to teach. Participation was encouraged Rather than allowing the participants to sit back and watch the presentations, they were encouraged to participate and to create, tweet, ask questions, answer
without hesitation or anxiety. It is less daunting then being in a room of dozens if not hundreds of other teachers.
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questions, share their experiences. It created a collaborative atmosphere, rather than a lecture-format. Personalized Learning and Choice Each session could be downloaded and watched on-demand. Teachers could continuously review all the material presented as well as the chat room conversation at their own pace and on their own time. In addition there were over 50 different sessions to select from, therefore teachers could choose sessions that resonated with their interests and needs and didnt have to worry about missing a session. Lifetime Learning Every session of the conference was archived, thus providing opportunities for teachers to log into the conference session recordings anytime, even after the conference ended. This provides a life long learning opportunity for the teachers. They could also use the recordings in their own schools for professional development or to share with their students for lesson learning. Furthermore, most of the presenters included their contact and social networking information so that participants could build their professional network and allow the learning to continue and grow over time.
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Chapter 3: Conference Beginnings Chapter 3, 4, and 5 will outline how the conference was developed over a 7 month period. It will include different ideas presented as well as decisions made during the process. Not all the decisions made ended up being the best decisions and there will be some discussion in the chapter about ways to improve upon the initial conference. In addition, it will include all the complexities of developing a virtual conference on a zero dollar budget. Forming a Committee In order to enact my idea for a virtual professional development conference around education technology, I knew that I could not build the entire conference by myself. Therefore, I began to think about developing a conference committee. Having zero budget, I had to rely on colleagues who would be willing to volunteer their time and expertise to do the work. I knew I needed to find experts with various strengths. I needed experts in education technology, experts in teacher education, and experts in outreach. In addition, since the University of Michigan was a research-based and teaching school, it was important to include graduate students. First, it was important to have the support of a faculty member who was in a leadership role in the school. I recruited the coordinator of one of our Masters in Teaching programs to join the committee, Dr. Teresa McMahon. While not an education technology expert, Dr. McMahon has great knowledge of teaching, professional development, and connections in the school of education. Next, it was important to have a tech-guru who could work behind the scenes on the technology troubleshooting and handle all of the virtual classroom issues that may arise. One of the members of our technology services, Ron Miller was willing and eager to help out. Third I needed to find other teacher educators with some technology education knowledge who taught in the same programs as myself. For this I found two colleagues. Kristin Fontichiaro and Dr. Jeff Stanzler. Kristin taught in our school of information and was an expert in library media. She has a large following in the library media world, writes books on technology in teaching and has impeccable technology skills and understanding of pedagogy. Jeff is also instructor in the school of education who has amazing foundational understanding of education technology and ran online learning simulation courses at the School of Education. In addition I wanted to find someone from the outreach department who has knowledge about continuing education credits and public relations. Dr. Laura Roop, one of our outreach coordinators was willing to come aboard and help out. As the University of Michigan is a teaching institution, I also thought it was important to include a graduate student who was studying education technologies. A first year graduate student Florencia Gomez was eager and excited to be part of the committee. While we had a committee, none of us were certain on how to proceed. This was purely a grassroots effort. November 2010: The First Meeting Our first committee meeting occurred in November 2010. The very first item we did as a group was to brainstorm many ways to create a unique and effective learning 13
experience for teachers. Below are the goals and to do list for the first conference from our original meeting Goals: Conference would be held in May at the end of the preservice teachers teacher training. 100 teachers and preservice teachers participating Offer continuing education credits CEUs Get IRB to study conference Market the conference Align with National Education Technology Plan Have two Keynote Speakers 30 sessions Selection of session types (Panels, Lectures, and Workshops) Decision NOT to have vendor or sponsor sessions for the first year To Do: Find a virtual conference space Find a grant to help with funding Find two Keynote Speakers Find someone to build a website (school of information) Figure out how to get the State of Michigan to approve .5 CEUs (5 hours of sessions) for the conference Brainstorm ideas for advertising and marketing conference Establishing a Conference Theme and Title Our committee needed to decide on the topic of the conference and type of presentations. Originally we thought that the conference would be a general theme of teaching and learning with sessions ranging from special education to teaching social studies to using technology in schools. However, the more we began to think about all the nuances of teaching and learning we felt that narrowing down our conference focus would be smarter and allow participants to know exactly what they were getting. Teaching and learning was just too broad, thus we decided to focus the conference on using education technology in K12 schools. This focus on a theme of education technology seemed significant since it is often an area many new and veteran teachers tend to struggle with, and there are always new technology tools that teachers need to learn about. In addition, virtual classrooms afforded presenters the ability to create interactive sessions on different technology tools since they could easily go out to the web and share the tools. Therefore, after deciding to focus on education technology, we had to come up with a catchy name. Our criteria for the theme: It had to tell participants that this was a practitioner conference, not a research conference That the conference was for teachers The focus was education technology It was a hip and innovative conference It was associated with the University of Michigan It was 100% virtual 14
Many ideas were tossed around in our committee. Teaching with Technology Conference, The Practical Virtual Conference on Technology, UofM. Ultimately, Teresa came up with 4T: Teachers Teaching Teachers about Technology. While it did not say anything about virtual, we could shorten the title to 4T Virtual Conference. It also did not say anything about the University of Michigan. But we could call it the UofM 4T Virtual Conference. We thought it sounded hip and engaging. We were sold!
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Chapter 4: Evaluating Virtual Conference Tools Chapter 4 focuses on how I selected the virtual conferencing tool that we would use for the synchronous part of the conference. There were many free tools to choose from and below highlights many of the tools considered. One of the great benefits of a virtual conference versus a face-to-face conference is the low cost. A virtual conference could be created and developed for an extremely low cost (actually it could be done 100% free!). With the assistance of free or low- cost web2.0 resources, there are plenty of virtual, interactive classrooms that could be used for the conference sessions. Originally I explored many free online conferencing resources. In this chapter we will share our exploration of these resources. Our requirements for a virtual conference room: Ability to present live and synchronous to any place in the world Must be FREE for participants and they should not have to register with a site to use the conference room The capability of having at least 100 participants in a session without bandwidth issues The ability for the presenter to easily navigate the conference tools The ability for participants to chat and ask questions of the presenter, and see the other questions from other participants The ability for the presentation to be recorded and archived The ability to take attendance at the sessions for continuing education credits The ability for the presenter to include their own PowerPoint, images and movie files The ability for the presenter to link out to websites, screen share their desktop to participants The ability for the presenter to ask quick polling questions and receive quick feedback from the participants in real time The ability for the presenter to private chat with participants The ability for their to be more than presenting controlling the session The ability for the presenter to use video and audio while they are presenting No advertising in the virtual room Call in options to listen and participate via phone Is there a mobile application so participants can use iPads, iPods, or Smartphone to participate The ability to preload pages into the presentation days before the presentation begins Can create multiple meeting rooms and have them running simultaneously File sharing options (send files to participants) Free Tools: Considering our zero budget, I needed to try to keep the conference 100% free, so it was important that I explored the many free virtual meeting/conferencing tools on the Internet. Below is a list and short description of the different tools that I evaluated. 16
DimDim (http://dimdim.com) The first resource that I considered using was DimDim. Some of the committee members classes had been using DimDim for creating webinars. DimDim allowed anyone to create a synchronous webinar with both video and audio. I found that DimDim was excellent for small class webinars, but sometimes had bandwitch issues and DimDims free version only allowed 20 participants per session.

Need
Yes Yes but you must pay for it No
Ability to present live, real-time synchronous to any place in the world
X X X

The ability for participants to chat and ask questions of the presenter, and see the other questions from other participants Must be FREE for participants and they should not have to register with a site to use the conference room The capability of having at least 100 participants in a session without bandwidth issues The ability for the presenter to easily navigate the conference tools

(free up
X X

to 20)
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The ability for the presentation to be recorded and archived The ability to take attendance at the sessions for SB CEU credits
X X X X X X X

(yes, but you do not get a spreadsheet of names)
The ability for the presenter to include their own PowerPoint, images and movie files The ability for the presenter to link out to website, screen share their desktop to participants The ability for the presenter to ask quick polling questions and receive quick feedback from the participants in real time The ability for the presenter to private chat with participants The ability for their to be more than presenting controlling the session The ability for the presenter to use video and audio while they are presenting Advertisements? Call in options to listen and participate via phone Mobile App? The ability to preload pages into the presentation days before the presentation begins? Can create multiple meeting rooms and have them running simultaneously
File sharing options (send files to participants)
X (yes but need separate accounts)
X X

AnyMeeting (http://anymeeting.com) Anymeeting was a very easy to use resource. It had some great benefits (up to 200 participants in a virtual room and easy recording and polling). One of the big concerns was that you could not upload a file (such as a PowerPoint) rather you had
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to screenshare your desktop. Although I did not have any problems while testing the site, the screensharing could take up a lot more bandwidth and could cause concerns for presenters.

Need
X X X X
(up to 200)
The ability for participants to chat and ask questions of the presenter, and see the other questions from other participants Must be FREE for participants and they should not have to register with a site to use the conference room The capability of having at least 100 participants in a session without bandwidth issues The ability for the presenter to easily navigate the conference tools The ability for the presentation to be recorded and archived The ability to take attendance at the sessions for SB CEU credits
X X X
(yes, but you do not get a spreadsheet of
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names) The ability for the presenter to include their own PowerPoint, images and movie files
X X X X X X X X

(but you
The ability for the presenter to link out to website, screen share their desktop to participants The ability for the presenter to ask quick polling questions and receive quick feedback from the participants in real time The ability for the presenter to private chat with participants The ability for their to be more than presenting controlling the session The ability for the presenter to use video and audio while they are presenting Advertisements? Call in options to listen and participate via phone Mobile App? The ability to preload pages into the presentation days before the presentation begins? Can create multiple meeting rooms and have them running simultaneously
must screen share)
File sharing options (send files to participants)
X (yes but need separate accounts)
X X

Join.me (http://Join.me ) Join.me was by far the simplest application. It is downloaded to your desktop and runs off of your desktop. While you can screenshare and talk and chat, the more sophisticated features that we were looking for were not there such as using webcams and not being able to upload PowerPoints or share files.
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Need
X X X X
(up to 200)
The ability for participants to chat and ask questions of the presenter, and see the other questions from other participants Must be FREE for participants and they should not have to register with a site to use the conference room The capability of having at least 100 participants in a session without bandwidth issues The ability for the presenter to easily navigate the conference tools The ability for the presentation to be recorded and archived The ability to take attendance at the sessions for SB CEU credits
X X X
(yes, but
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you do not get a spreadsheet of names) The ability for the presenter to include their own PowerPoint, images and movie files
X X X X X

(but you
must screen share) The ability for the presenter to link out to website, screen share their desktop to participants The ability for the presenter to ask quick polling questions and receive quick feedback from the participants in real time The ability for the presenter to private chat with participants The ability for their to be more than presenting controlling the session The ability for the presenter to use video and audio while they are presenting Advertisements? Call in options to listen and participate via phone Mobile App? The ability to preload pages into the presentation days before the presentation begins? Can create multiple meeting rooms and have them running simultaneously File sharing options (send files to participants)
X X X
X X

X X

Brainshark (http://my.brainshark.com) I immediately learned that Brainshark was more of an asynchronous presentation tool. You cannot record and present live to participants in Brainshark. You can use audio, upload resources such as PowerPoints and record a presentation. I found that Brainshark was not a good option for our live conference but a really nice tool for anyone interested in doing a recorded conference, where participants can learn at their own pace and download recorded presentations or modules. Brainshark could also be used as a module activity.
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Need
X(you can do
this but not live)
X(you
The ability for participants to chat and ask questions of the presenter, and see the other questions from other participants
can pre- record webinars)
Must be FREE for participants and they should not have to register with a site to use the conference room The capability of having at least 100 participants in a session without bandwidth issues The ability for the presenter to easily navigate the conference tools The ability for the presentation to be recorded and archived The ability to take attendance at the sessions for SB CEU credits
X X X X X
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The ability for the presenter to include their own PowerPoint, images and movie files The ability for the presenter to link out to website, screen share their desktop to participants The ability for the presenter to ask quick polling questions and receive quick feedback from the participants in real time The ability for the presenter to private chat with participants The ability for their to be more than presenting controlling the session The ability for the presenter to use video and audio while they are presenting Advertisements? Call in options to listen and participate via phone Mobile App? Limit on Length of Meetings/Webinars? The ability to preload pages into the presentation days before the presentation begins? Can create multiple meeting rooms and have them running simultaneously File sharing options (send files to participants)
X(yes, but not

live)
X X

X(just audio)

Yugma (https://www.yugma.com ) Yugma is a tool that you can use online or download to your desktop for virtual conferencing. The free version allows for easy screensharing, recording, email invitations and chatting. You cannot upload files to present (such as a PowerPoint, you must screenshare them or file share). In addition, you must pay for more than 30 minute webinars (at one time) or to file share. Yugma is a nice tool for easy webinars that only need to screenshare for less than 30 minutes.
X X(yes, but, not live) X(can download presentation)
X X X X

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Need
X X X

The ability for participants to chat and ask questions of the presenter, and see the other questions from other participants Must be FREE for participants and they should not have to register with a site to use the conference room The capability of having at least 100 participants in a session without bandwidth issues The ability for the presenter to easily navigate the conference tools The ability for the presentation to be recorded and archived The ability to take attendance at the sessions for SB CEU credits The ability for the presenter to include their own PowerPoint, images and movie files
X X

X X

(but you must
screen share, cannot upload)
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The ability for the presenter to link out to website, screen share their desktop to participants The ability for the presenter to ask quick polling questions and receive quick feedback from the participants in real time The ability for the presenter to private chat with participants The ability for their to be more than presenting controlling the session The ability for the presenter to use video and audio while they are presenting Advertisements? Call in options to listen and participate via phone
Mobile App? Limit on Length of Meetings/Webinars?
X Skype and teleconferencing Options X up to 30 X can

minutes per meeting
X X

purchase unlimited time
The ability to preload pages into the presentation days before the presentation begins? Can create multiple meeting rooms and have them running simultaneously File sharing options (send files to participants)
X X

Live Minutes (http://liveminutes.com) LiveMinutes is a wonderful tool for simple online conferencing. It has a built in notes feature that acts like a wiki where participants can add their notes, edit and build knowledge together. This is a nice platform for documenting group work and small group knowledge building (very similar to using a Google document). The archive of LiveMinutes is a nice PDF report of the chatroom, whiteboard, wiki and any other documentation shared in LiveMinutes. In addition, LiveMinutes integrates nicely with Skype. The fact that there is a limit of 20 participants per meeting ruled out Live Minute for our virtual conference, but it is a useful tool for smaller online sessions and professional development. 26

Need
X X X

The ability for participants to chat and ask questions of the presenter, and see the other questions from other participants Must be FREE for participants and they should not have to register with a site to use the conference room The capability of having at least 100 participants in a session without bandwidth issues
X
(only 20 at a time)
The ability for the presenter to easily navigate the conference tools The ability for the presentation to be recorded and archived
X X (but
audio/video is not saved)
The ability to take attendance at the sessions for SB CEU credits
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The ability for the presenter to include their own PowerPoint, images and movie files The ability for the presenter to link out to website, screen share their desktop to participants The ability for the presenter to ask quick polling questions and receive quick feedback from the participants in real time The ability for the presenter to private chat with participants The ability for their to be more than one person presenting controlling the session The ability for the presenter to use video and audio while they are presenting Advertisements? Call in options to listen and participate via phone Mobile App? Limit on Length of Meetings/Webinars? The ability to preload pages into the presentation days before the presentation begins? Can create multiple meeting rooms and have them running simultaneously File sharing options (send files to participants)
X X X

X(limited) X

Vyew (http://vyew.com ) Vyew is a simple and effective tool which I strongly considered using for the Virtual Conference. One excellent feature is the moderating feature for presenters to control how the participants were able to participate, there are many levels of moderation to select from such as view only, view and use tools, view and upload, full privileges. The virtual rooms can also be public or private. In addition, there is an innovative sticky-note annotation feature, where presenters and participants can mark places in the presentation with voice or text comments using sticky-notes. The only negative we found was that there was not a recording option, which was important for the purpose of our conference.
X X X (as a report at end)
X X

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Need
X X X

X(you X

The ability for the presenter to easily navigate the conference tools The ability for the presentation to be recorded and archived The ability to take attendance at the sessions for SB CEU credits
have to pay for more than 10 per room)
X
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The ability for the presenter to include their own PowerPoint, images and movie files The ability for the presenter to link out to website, screen share their desktop to participants The ability for the presenter to ask quick polling questions and receive quick feedback from the participants in real time The ability for the presenter to private chat with participants The ability for their to be more than presenting controlling the session The ability for the presenter to use video and audio while they are presenting Advertisements?
X X X X X X X (if you pay,

they are removed)
Call in options to listen and participate via phone Mobile App? Limit on Length of Meetings/Webinars? The ability to preload pages into the presentation days before the presentation begins? Can create multiple meeting rooms and have them running simultaneously File sharing options (send files to participants)
X X X X X
Google Hangouts Google Hangouts had just begun when we were forming the conference and since we started the conference they have added the On-Air feature (which allows recording to Youtube of hangout sessions). One nice feature of Google Hangout is the ease of interaction with Google Documents, thus it is easy to pull up PowerPoint- type presentations from Documents or Speadsheets to share and edit. Another nice aspect of Google Hangouts is that there is not a limit on the number of participants. The one awkward aspect was the recording, which works with YouTube. There were some participants who were not comfortable with the recording being posted on YouTube. Other than the recording feature, I highly recommend districts with
30
zero budgets and who have a large audience for their virtual conferences (or webinars) consider using Google Hangouts.

Need
X X X X X X(using
Hangouts-on air feature)
The ability for participants to chat and ask questions of the presenter, and see the other questions from other participants Must be FREE for participants and they should not have to register with a site to use the conference room The capability of having at least 100 participants in a session without bandwidth issues The ability for the presenter to easily navigate the conference tools The ability for the presentation to be recorded and archived
31
The ability to take attendance at the sessions for SB CEU credits The ability for the presenter to include their own PowerPoint, images and movie files The ability for the presenter to link out to website, screen share their desktop to participants The ability for the presenter to ask quick polling questions and receive quick feedback from the participants in real time The ability for the presenter to private chat with participants The ability for their to be more than presenting controlling the session The ability for the presenter to use video and audio while they are presenting Advertisements? Call in options to listen and participate via phone Mobile App? Limit on Length of Meetings/Webinars? The ability to preload pages into the presentation days before the presentation begins? Can create multiple meeting rooms and have them running simultaneously File sharing options (send files to participants)
X X X X X X X X X X X X
Paid Tools While many of the free tools could have been used for the conference (in particular Google Hangouts), we did have free access to a paid synchronous conferencing tool at the University of Michigan called Elluminate and Adobe Connect. Therefore we decided to explore both of these tools as well. Elluminate/Blackboard Collaborate (http://elluminate.com) While I contemplated using Google Hangouts (as it had almost all of the features that I was looking for in a virtual learning room), I was worried about how public the 32
YouTube recordings would be and I wanted to make sure I had some control over the recordings. Since I could not find exactly what I was looking for, I decided to turn to my teaching institution. At the school of education, we had a license for Elluminate. I had used Elluminate to teach some virtual classes and knew I liked the tool. I met with the technology services to find out if I would be able to use Elluminate for the virtual conference sessions. What I learned was that Elluminate would be able to fit my particular needs. Up to 100 participants in a room (I originally was hoping to have 100 to 200 attendees for the first year of the conference but was assuming that they would not all attend every session). Multiple rooms open at the same time (thus allowing for multiple break out sessions during each hour). Presenters could use both audio and video to present PowerPoints and media could be uploaded to Elluminate The participants could use the interactive white board, chat room, video cameras or microphone to participate in the session. The sessions could be live and recorded Need Yes Yes but No you must pay for it Ability to present live, real-time synchronous
to any place in the world
X X X
The ability for participants to chat and ask questions of the presenter, and see the other questions from other participants Must be FREE for participants and they should not have to register with a site to use the conference room The capability of having at least 100 participants in a session without bandwidth issues The ability for the presenter to easily navigate the conference tools The ability for the presentation to be recorded and archived The ability to take attendance at the sessions for SB CEU credits The ability for the presenter to include their own PowerPoint, images and movie files The ability for the presenter to link out to website, screen share their desktop to participants
X X X X X X
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The ability for the presenter to ask quick polling questions and receive quick feedback from the participants in real time The ability for the presenter to private chat with participants The ability for their to be more than presenting controlling the session The ability for the presenter to use video and audio while they are presenting Advertisements? Call in options to listen and participate via phone Mobile App? Limit on Length of Meetings/Webinars? The ability to preload pages into the presentation days before the presentation begins? Can create multiple meeting rooms and have them running simultaneously File sharing options (send files to participants)
X X X X X X X X X
Adobe Connect Adobe connect had many qualities that I was looking for in a virtual conference room. Our license allowed for 200 participants per room. In addition you could preload material in the room days before the presentation (this is helpful for presenters who want everything set up so they can practice). I did find the interface to be a bit daunting to work with (almost too many choices for layouts and confusing to go back and forth between layouts). It was also more difficult for participants to take polls (you had to set them up before your presentation if you wanted them to be smoothly integrated---this is a bit awkward). Need Yes Yes but No you must pay for it Ability to present live, real-time synchronous
to any place in the world
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X X X (up to 200
with our license)
The ability for the presenter to easily navigate the conference tools
X (somewhat
not always intuitive)
The ability for the presentation to be recorded and archived The ability to take attendance at the sessions for SB CEU credits The ability for the presenter to include their own PowerPoint, images and movie files The ability for the presenter to link out to website, screen share their desktop to participants The ability for the presenter to ask quick polling questions and receive quick feedback from the participants in real time
X X X X X (yes, but X X X X

need to set them up ahead of time)
The ability for the presenter to private chat with participants The ability for their to be more than presenting controlling the session The ability for the presenter to use video and audio while they are presenting Advertisements? Call in options to listen and participate via phone Mobile App? Limit on Length of Meetings/Webinars?
X X
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The ability to preload pages into the presentation days before the presentation begins? Can create multiple meeting rooms and have them running simultaneously File sharing options (send files to participants)
X X X
Ultimately I decided to use Elluminate for the first year of the conference. While both Adobe Connect and Elluminate were essentially free for me to use, I realize that it does cost money to purchase a licenses for a school district to use Elluminate. The cost varies greatly depending on how many participants you would like to accommodate in each room (as well as other features). I would recommend any school interested in using Elluminate contact their local RESA or intermediate school district to see if they could get a discount by purchasing a multi-district license or share the cost of one license to use Elluminate. Besides Elluminate there are other paid versions of web-based virtual rooms that work in a similar fashion, these include WizIQ and GotoMeeting. These versions would be worth looking into if you did not like the Elluminate features or felt it was too expensive for your districts budget. Later in the book, I will also discuss grant opportunities that would help to purchase Elluminate licenses for K12 schools.
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Chapter 5: A Website to Call Home Chapter 5 describes the search for a website to house the conference information. Once we found a virtual space to conduct the live sessions our next agenda item was to find a webspace for the conference. Since it was our first year of the conference we decided not to ask UofM to use some of their webspace (we were trying to avoid having to ask permission every time we posted to the website, which could take some time) and instead create a website that we could completely control. Thus we began to investigate many free online website creation tools. Our criteria for a website creation tool: It had to be free or very low cost It had to look professional Easy template WYSIWYG editor The ability to create forms and surveys The ability to collect data easily from the forms (e.gcreate a registration form where all registration email addresses can easily be compiled in an excel spreadsheet) The ability to blog The ability to embed video, images, and other media The ability to easily link between pages The ability to password protect specific pages The ability to add many pictures with large storage limits The ability to easily track statistics The ability to create a contact form Upload a document into the form (such as a resume) Below we describe the various tools that we considered using to host conference website and general information. All of these tools are free. Google Sites (http://google.com/sites) One of the first tools that I looked at was Google Sites. While I enjoyed using Google Docs and the fact that Google Sites was 100% free, I was not very pleased with a few of the features on Google Sites. While you could password protect the webpages, a Google account was required to login. I did not want our participants to be forced to get a Google account. Second concern was the template for Google Sites did not look very professional. There were not a lot of choices and most of them were too basic or too unprofessional for us. I also did not like that the templates all had the Google search bar at the top of the screen. In addition, while I could integrate the Google Forms, I could not find a way to easily let people who completed a form include a document to upload.
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Wix (http://wix.com) Wix had a very professional look and feel. I really liked the professional template choices. On negative was that the site did use a lot of Java. I was nervous about relying a website that heavily used Java when people from all over the world would need to access the site. Another problem was that participants could not upload documents into the forms pages (for example presenters could not upload their resume), and I really needed a site that would allow presenters and participants to upload forms.
Yola (http://yola.com)
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Yola was one of my top choices for the website. Yola had a professional look with many templates to choose from. In addition, Yola had free password protection on individual pages. The one negative of Yola (similar to Wix) was that participants could not upload forms into Yola, which would make our collection for the continuing education credits more difficult.
Weebly (http://yola.com) Weebly was one of the last sites I looked at and by far my favorite. Weebly had an excellent selection of professional templates to choose among. Another aspect of Weebly that was nice was that they had specific pages that were designated for blogging. There also was a wide variety of widgets to select from. In the end I decided on Weebly as the best option to meet our criteria.
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Cost Ease of Use Password Protect Individual Pages Professional looking template? Forms and collect data from participants Can Upload Files to Forms? Embed or upload video, images and files? Blog Option? Mobile Site Option? ecommerce Option?
Google Sites
Free Poor Yes, but very clunky No Yes
Wix
Free Fair No
Yola
Free Easy Yes
Weebly
Free Easy Yes, but must upgrade to premium Yes Yes
Yes Yes, but limited
Yes Yes
No Yes
No Yes
No Yes
Yes Yes
No No Yes
Yes Yes Yes, but must upgrade to premium
Yes Yes Yes
Yes Yes Yes
Setting up the Website Once I decided to use Weebly for our website, I needed to decide on what pages we wanted to have on the site. In order to make this decision I looked at a variety of conference websites. Ultimately I decided on the following pages: HomeAbout the Conference Conference Blog Registration Call for Proposals Conference Schedule Featured Speakers Contact Us Tutorial on Using Elluminate Conference Session Archives (password protected) Continuing Education Credits Webpage Design I searched through the template options in Weebly and eventually decided on a very simple, yet professional look. I also knew that I could add my own pictures into the template (although I opted to use the template pictures the first year). Homepage
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First I worked on the Home Page. I wanted to develop a short paragraph describing the purpose of our conference. I wanted to make sure the following information was explicit: This was a FREE conference for all participants All participants could get FREE continuing education credits The conference was virtual The conference was aimed at practicing K-12 teachers interested in education technology (all levels) The conference was synchronous All sessions were available via archived recordings for registered participants Any educator was welcome to submit a proposal to present Links to call for proposals and registration There would be UofM alumni meet up rooms The conference was associated with the University of Michigan School of Education I also wanted to make sure that the homepage was not too cluttered or confusing. I was hoping for a very clean and simple look to the webpage. Conference Blog Fortunately in Weebly, it is incredibly easy to create a blog page within our website. I wanted to have a place where educators could subscribe to our site and easily get updates in their email or RSS readers. Thus I wanted a blog page. In addition it was important that readers of the blog be able to comment on new blog posts. I also wanted to include some widgets on the blog page. These widgets included: Link to our Facebook Page Link to our Twitter Page Link to any sponsors
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Registration The registration page was incredibly important. This was where I would collect contact information of all participants. It had to be easy to use, reliable and secure. I used the Weebly forms to create a registration page. I wanted to make sure we collect some data on the participants: Email address (to contact them with updates and make a master list of participants) Location (to get a sense of how national or international the conference was) Area of interest (Grade and/or subject they teach)
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Call for Proposals Similar to the registration page, the Call for Proposals was also vital. This page was going to collect all the data about the potential presenter and their presentation. I did not want to have to go back to presenters and ask them for more information that could have been included in their proposal. Similar to the registration I used the Weebly forms options to create a form for potential presenters to complete. The data collected on the form included: Name Where they work Location Title of Presentation Short Description of Presentation How the presentation fits into the national education technology plan Target audience for the presentation Co-presenters Bio of main presenter Date and time preferences for presenting If they had used Elluminate before If they would like a tutorial on using Elluminate If they were UofM alumni
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Conference Schedule The conference schedule page was going to convey all of the individual conference session information to the participants. It was the page that would communicate the title and descriptions of each session, when sessions were occurring, and the Elluminate links to participant in the sessions. I had to make sure that I was clear about communicating these features. Originally I was going to embed a Google Calendar into Weebly with titles and times of each session. But I found the Google
47
Calendar to be difficult to read. Therefore, I decided to individually type in every session in linear order for each day.
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I also created a sessions at a glance PDF file, where participants could download the one-page document to see all the session titles and times. Finally, I told participants that they would receive an email each day with a list of sessions (and the Elluminate links) so that they could easily click on the links and get reminders of the sessions for the day.
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Conference Sessions At A Glance

Color Key Keynote UofM Reconnect Panel of Speakers Lecture Workshop Poster and Discussion
Conference Sessions At Sunday May Monday May Tuesday A Glance 22nd 23rd May 24th Human versus Virtual Learning Environments
Wednesday May 25th
1:30pm
2:45pm
iTeach: Consideration s and The Future of Project Based Possibilites the Web and Learning in for Using Learning the Cloud iPods and iPads in Classrooms Google tools are free, but now what? Learn how to easily build online shared curricular websites and school wide online portfolios for every student Microsofts Mouse Mischief: Transforming Inexpensive Computer Mice into Invaluable Assessment Tools
Learning Intensive Storybird for with Classes Collaborative Technology
4:00pm
Mobile Devices in and Beyond the Classroom
Featured Speakers The whole committee agreed that we wanted to have a few speakers that would draw in participants from both the K-12 world and the higher education world. We decided on two keynote speakers and about five or six featured speakers. Fortunately since the committee was full of practiced professional presenters, we decided that Jeff, Kristin, and I would each present one session. In addition, my
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former advisor and a faculty member at the University of Michigan, Dr. Barry Fishman, was a member of the national technology education plan committee and a perfect choice as a kick-off keynote. It was also a no-cost choice as Dr. Fishman was willing to present for free. He would talk about the national education technology plan and demonstrate how it will and could affect practicing K-12 teachers. Our second keynote would be more difficult. When we started preparing for the conference, we did not have any money, while we were working on a grant, we could not offer to pay anyoneyet. So we put the second keynote speaker on hold, as well as asking a couple other featured speakers. We were hoping to receive our grant, which would allow us to pay a few speakers for their participation. Our featured speaker page included: Pictures and Bio of Speakers Links to Speakers archived presentations Links to Speakers Twitter, Webpages and LinkedIN pages Information about each speakers session
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Contact Us It was important that participants and potential participants and presenters have an easy way to access the 4T committee with questions or issues. Once again, I used the Weebly form to create a simple contact form that included: Paragraph text box for open-ended questions Email contact for person asking the question
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Elluminate Tutorial Page I was aware that many of our participants and presenters were probably not very familiar with Elluminate and would need some help learning how to use the tool in order to participate in the conference. And yet, it was important that any educator be able to easily participate in the conference without inhabition of the technology. Thus I decided to dedicate a page on our website to Elluminate tutorial information. I included: A recorded video tutorial on using Elluminate (made from Elluminate) An open 24/7 Elluminate practice room for presenters (where they were automatically moderators as soon as they logged in) An open 24/7 Elluminate practice room for participants to make sure they could log into the rooms via their computers Link to Elluminate tutorials on their website 4 different optional synchronous sessions for live Elluminate 1 hour tutorials A contact form for questions on Elluminate
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Conference Session Archives One of the great benefits of a virtual conference is that all the sessions can be archived. Participants can watch the sessions, start and stop them, at their own convenience. Therefore, I dedicated a page to the recordings of every session. Elluminate emails a link to the recording of the session for each moderator, making it very easy for me to access the recording links. As the sessions finished, I would post the recording links on the session archives. Additionally, I decided to password protect the session archives page. The main reason being that I wanted this to be an exclusive feature only to educators that took the time to register and had a certain level of dedication to honestly attending the conference. We thought if the archives were completely public, then many educators would forgo registration and simply wait for the archives. Without registration, it would be very difficult to track the number of participants, their reasons for participating. Additionally, communication with participates would also be very difficult. Thus I added a simple password to the archives page, which we emailed out to all registered participants so that they could access the recordings. Elluminate also tracks all downloads of each recording, so we were able to track how often sessions were downloaded (to see what sessions were the most popular). Continuing Education Credits The committee thought one way to entice teachers to attend the conference was to offer them some continuing education credits (CEUs) for attending various sessions. In addition, we decided that UofM would pay all the filing fees for the CEUs so that the teachers would not have pay anything to receive the CEUs. We worked with the state of Michigan to get approval for 20 of our sessions to count for SB CEUs. We were approved for .5 SB CEUs for the first year (which is the equivalent to attending 5 hours of conference sessions). We needed to include a page dedicated to teachers who were interested in earning the CEUs. The CEU page included: A list of all 20 sessions that were approved for CEU credit (they had to attend 5 sessions) A form to complete after they had attended all 5 of their sessions and directions on how to hand in their form A reminder that they needed to include their email address that is registered with the state in order to receive their CEUs
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Chapter 6: Funding the Conference Now that we had a website, we were hoping to find some small funding to pay potential keynote speakers, website domains, and possibly people to moderate the presentation rooms. Thus we looked into possible grants for the funding. In this chapter we describe our methods for funding the conference. Grant Writing While I knew that I could conduct the basic conference without funding, in order to get keynote speakers that would have a big draw, I would need some funding for speaker fees and possibly other expenses (such as a domain name) to increase the conference appeal. I first explored Grantwrangler (http://grantwrangler.com ) to see if there were any higher education grants for teacher education, I found very few hits. There were numerous grants for K-12 teachers, and I would recommend that any K-12 school take a close look at Grantwrangler.com for funding opportunities. Next I turned to my local community looking for grants and found that at my university they had small teaching and learning grants for instructors interested in using technology in their teaching practices. Therefore another committee member Teresa McMahon and I applied for the grant, and ended up receiving $5149.50, which was more than we needed to run the conference. I highly recommend looking locally for grants (many K12 schools have PTO/PTA grants, intermediate school districts, state education technology organization and local universities tend to have grants that collaborate with the community). Another option for grant funding is to use the website: DonorsChoose (http://donorschoose.org ) where you can place your school project and ask people to donate small sums of money. A few other national organizations have small grant opportunities that would be perfect for a K12 virtual conference. They include Learning and Leadership Grants with the NEA (http://www.neafoundation.org/pages/educators/grant-programs/grant- application/learning-and-leadership) and Cisco Product Grant Program (http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac48/pgp_home.html ). While virtual conference costs are very minimal, our hope was that after 2 years we would be able to use sponsors and vendors to pay any costs of the conference. Below I share a copy of our grant proposal that was accepted.
Our Grant Proposal that was accepted: Learning...Any Where, Any Place, Any Pace: Creating an annual virtual teacher education conference run by current Master of Arts with Certification (MAC) teaching interns. Faculty Development Fund Grant Proposal Liz Keren-Kolb, PhD and Teresa McMahon, PhD School of Education Feb 1, 2011
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I. Goals of the Project To prepare MAC teacher interns for teaching virtually in the 21st century To give current MAC teacher interns and MAC alumni an opportunity to present and participate in a professional virtual teaching conference To connect and reconnect current MAC teacher interns, MAC alumni and other educators throughout the world with the current research and best practices coming out of the School of Education To provide a meaningful public forum for current MAC teacher interns culminating performance in EDU 490: Teaching with Technology II. Project Design We are requesting funds to support a student-led professional virtual education conference. For five consecutive days at the end of Spring 2011 term, teaching interns in the Master of Arts with Elementary Certification program (ELMAC) will develop and conduct a virtual professional teaching and learning conference based around the theme of technology in education. Interns will choose to develop a 60-minute virtual presentation using one of four approaches: Panel discussion, lecture, poster session, or workshop. Interns can work individually or in groups on an issue or topic related to technology in education. Interns will develop a professional 60-minute session and conduct the virtual session live on a date and time of their choice during the five days. Interns will participate in other presentations. All segments of the conference will be captured, archived, and available on line after the conference has ended. School of Education alumni as well as educators from across the United States will be invited to present and participate (free of charge) in the virtual conference. Thus, current ELMAC interns will have the opportunity to network with educators from different regions of the United States. In addition, Michigan teachers will have the option of earning and paying for State Board-Continuing Education Units (SB-CEUs) for participating in the conference. The conference will have two keynote speakers as well as featured speakers each day who are experts in the field of technology education. Furthermore, there will be virtual breakout rooms for ELMAC alumni as well as rooms for meeting up with individuals of mutual interest. The conference will be conducted virtually with the assistance of Elluminate software (http://elluminate.com).
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III. Draft of Virtual Conference Schedule: Sunday Monday Tuesday May 22nd May 23rd May 24th 6:00am 6:00am 20 minute 20 minute Feature starter Feature starter speaker speaker 8:00pm 6:00am-9:00pm 6:00am-9:00pm Keynote Speaker Virtual Seminars, Virtual Seminars, Posters, Panels, Posters, Panels, and Workshops and Workshops 8:45pm 9:00pm 9:00pm Virtual live Virtual alumni Virtual topical discussion on rooms interest rooms Keynote
Wednesday May 25th 6:00am 20 minute Feature starter speaker 6:00am-9:00pm Virtual Seminars, Posters, Panels, and Workshops 9:00pm Virtual region rooms
Thursday May 26th 6:00am 20 minute Feature starter speaker 7:00am-12:00pm Virtual Seminars, Posters, Panels, and Workshops 12:00pm Virtual Keynote Speaker 1:00pm Virtual live wrap- up discussion and conference evaluation
IV. Project Implementation Lecturer and research associate Dr. Liz Keren-Kolb will support the ELMAC interns with the technical and content aspects of their conference presentations while Dr. Teresa McMahon the ELMAC program coordinator will assist in overseeing the conference. In January 2011, a website was developed to invite alumni from the University of Michigan School of Education as well as practicing teachers and administrators across the United States to submit a session proposal for the conference (http://uofmvirtualconference.weebly.com ). Registration will open in February for all interested in attending the conference. The call for proposals begins in February and will run until the end of March. In April the ELMAC interns will be introduced to how the conference will work and will be asked to refine one of their course projects or select a new topic for their presentation. They will have the option of working alone or in collaborative groups for their presentations. The interns will have one month to develop a one-hour session (poster, panel, seminar, or workshop) on their chosen topic. The interns will be encouraged to contact experts in the field (teachers, administrators, higher-education faculty, studentsetc) to participate in their session at the virtual conference. Dr. Keren-Kolb and Dr. McMahon will assist the interns by locating two Keynote speakers for the opening and closing of the conference as well as featured speakers for each day. V. Teaching Approaches The instructional method is experiential. In this performance assessment, interns will show that they have learned how to teach virtually using interactive approaches in the Elluminate rooms. For example, interns may project a PowerPoint, share a website, poll their participants, have participants circle items on pictures (using live interactive whiteboard tools), project videos, hold live discussions, or divide participants into smaller discussion rooms. VI. Impact on Learning A goal of this project is for interns to show how they have honed their technical skills with virtual teaching tools. Given the topic this year Educational Technology the conference further reinforces how technology can be used to support learning for children and adults. The interns will have an authentic audience for their presentation topic and their techniques. By participating in other sessions in the conference the interns (and alumni) will have an opportunity to critique and learn new ideas about how to teach virtually. Ultimately the
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interns will leave the university better prepared to teach in virtual and blended K-12 schools. Moreover, the hope is that this conference will be annual conference that the interns can return to each year for continuing education and networking. VII. Scope This project has the ability to reach hundreds of the MAC alumni, current interns and other practicing educators. The following is a breakdown of the number of people who are likely to be involved in this conference. 54 current ELMAC interns 54 cooperating teachers 8-10 ELMCA and UM SoE faculty instructors 100+ELMAC and MAC alums 100+educators from around U.S. VIII. Continuation The goal of this event is for the conference to become an annual conference every spring for all School of Education alumni as well as non-University of Michigan educators. IX. Evaluation All sessions will be evaluated by survey feedback from participants. The ELMAC interns will reflect on their experiences in a post-conference written reflection. In addition there will be a general pre- and post-survey on the conference and the individuals who attend. X. Timeline September-December 2010 Conference committee began planning for conference January 2011 Began development of Conference Website http://uofmvirtualconference.weebly.com/ February 2011 Open Call for Proposals on Website Registration Opens on Website April 2011 Student teachers select a topic to present on at the conference All proposals reviewed by MAC students and committee members (will complete a Google Doc review form). Each proposal will have 2 reviewers. Selection of Keynote speakers April-May 2011 Research and development of presentation Conference program developed (website) Invitations for registration to conference sent out to educators and alumni May 2011 Conference conducted between May 22 to May 26 Evaluation of conference will occur via Google Forms at the end of each session as well as at the end of the entire conference. XI. Personnel Project Chair: Liz Keren-Kolb, Lecturer, School of Education Committee Members: Teresa McMahon, Assistant Professor, School of Education Jeffery Stanzler, Lecturer, School of Education Kristin Fontichiario, Clinical Assistant Professor, School of Information Laura Roop, Director, Outreach, School of Education
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XII. Budget Justification Total Budget=$5149.50. Keynote Speaker Honoraria ($1,000 per speaker) In order to draw in professional educators and UofM alumni we want to offer two well- known and motivating educational speakers as our Keynotes. Featured Speakers Honoraria ($200 per speaker) The conference will have 4 days of a kick off featured speaker who is prominent in the field of education technology. The feature speakers will help to pull more educators to our conference and provide gravitas to the event. Website development and Registration Log and Login ($2,349.50) We will need to develop a website that allows for registration, log ins, databases, and tracking of participants. In addition we would like to have our own domain and archive each conference. Cost of Weebly Website for 5yr ($199.75) Unique URL for 5yr ($149.75) Contribution to School of Education Elluminate fee ($2,000.00)
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Chapter 7: Marketing the Conference Knowing that we may not have any funding for the conference we decided to focus all of our marketing and advertising for the conference on social networking. We tried to include some aspects of the conference that would draw in participants and make the conference a unique experience. This chapter describes the marketing methods. Grass Roots Marketing with Social Networks Considering that it was the first year of the conference, the committees goal was to have about 100 participants. 50 of those participants would be from Michigans preservice teaching program and the other 50 from k-12 schools. When we began this process we did not know if we would have any funding for marketing so we decided to do some grass roots marketing and focus on social networking. First I knew that we had a Facebook alumni group site with about 250 UofM teaching alumnus. I sent out messages to all the members of the Facebook group informing them about the conference and inviting them to both participate as well as propose a session to present. Next we went to our professional learning networks on Twitter. I had over 2400 followers, mostly educators and a few other committee members had similar numbers. Myself and a few of the other committee members sent out tweets about the conference to our followers, encouraging them to register and propose a session. In addition, we realized that we should have social networking feeds devoted strictly to the conference itself. Thus we created a Twitter account for the conference (@4Tvirtualcon), a conference hash tag (#4tvirtualcon) and a Facebook Fan Page for the conference. I embedded the social networking feeds on the conference website blog and homepage. The Logo A large part of marketing the conference was having an appropriate logo that represented the goals of our conference. The logo would be used as the profile picture for both the official Facebook and Twitter conference pages. The message that we wanted our logo to send was Virtual Synchronous Archived Associated with University of Michigan About teaching with technology For K12 teachers Free! Originally I created a logo using Photoshop for the conference. It did not look all that professional and I knew that we needed something that could be marketable. Below is the original logo for the conference (with our original tag line of LearningAnywhere, anyplace, any pace). I was not very happy with this logo but we did use it for the first few months on our website.
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Looking for something more professional, we contact the PR department at the school of education at UofM. We asked them if they would be able to develop a logo for the conference and possibly publicize the conference on the school of education webpage (as well as their social networking feeds). They agreed to help with all three. Next, they put together a few logo options for us to consider. We eventually chose the logo below and then posted the logo on our website, Twitter and Facebook feeds.
Teachers Teaching Teachers
about Technology
National Education Technology Plan I wanted our conference to be unique and different from the many education technology conferences available to K12 educators. One unique aspect already was that our conference was 100% virtual, free, synchronous, live and archived. But our committee wanted another way to stand out with our content, thus we decided on the newly developed 2010 National Education Technology Plan. The plan had five strands of themes concerning where we were going in technology in education. We thought that if presenters would select a strand of the plan to focus their session on, it would be a unique way to send the message that our conference is about the future of teaching with technology. What we did not anticipate was how few K12 educators and technology specialists were aware of this plan, and we will talk more in chapter 11 about how this ended up not working very well for the conference. Featured Speakers to Draw in Participants
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Another important aspect of the conference was to obtain a few featured and keynote speakers that would draw educators to the conference. Originally we did not have any money, so we looked internally at UofM. One of our colleagues Dr. Barry Fishman is an excellent speaker, has been on the national education technology committee and is very well know in the field of learning technologies. Dr. Fishman is a member of the National Education Technology Committee to write the National Education Technology Plan. Dr. Fishman agreed to be a keynote speaker for not cost. We also considered other contacts that might be willing to be keynote for free if we did not receive our grant funding. Once we received our grant funding, I knew we could afford to pay a closing keynote speaker an honorarium. Our committee wanted our closing Keynote to introduce our educators to new ideas in teaching with technology, a bridge to the future! We wanted our closing keynote to engage the online audience (especially because it was synchronous). The committee had brainstormed a long list of people including others who worked on the national education technology plan. Some of these were big names, people who worked for the U.S. Department of Education. Once we had the list, the committee members went to our professional learning networks (social networks) to get reviews of these speakers. We asked other educators the following questions about the potential speakers; Where they engaging? Did they bring something new to the conference? Were people talking about them long after their speeches? Were they polished speakers and could they be comfortable in a virtual environment? This allowed us to quickly narrow down our list. Interestingly, we found that many of the big names tended to get poor reviews of being dull speakers who did not bring many new ideas to the field of education technology. Then I remembered the speaker I had seen who inspired me to start this conference in the first place, Dr. Lisa Dawley from Idaho State. She impressed me with her great knowledge of virtual teaching and learning and she was on the cutting edge of developing teaching standards for virtual teachers. She was also heavily involved with gaming online in teaching and learning. Our committee decided that Dr. Dawley was a good choice and we invited her to present (and we used some of our grant money to pay her a stipend for her time). We used our social networks to contact her via her email on her web blog. Being that she does not have to travel to the conference, it is much less time for her and less cost for our conference. Dr. Dawley agreed and we were thrilled! She would become our closing keynote on the last day of the conference at 9:00pm EST. Now that we had our keynote speakers we began to consider some featured speakers to draw in more participants. Most of the committee members including myself, Dr. Jeff Stanzler (head of the Internet learning simulations at UofM), Kristin Fontichario (author of many education technology-related books and a leader in library media science) all decided that we would each present one session. We also targeted a few of our other colleagues at UofM who had strong followings in education technology to present. We sent out mass email and Facebook messages to our alumni groups. In addition, we sent personal email invitations to graduates from our program who were now teaching with technology in the K12 world that 64
we thought would have something significant to share with the greater community of educators. It was important that we targeted people who could create useful sessions for K12 teachers, not full of research but full of practice and practical solutions and innovations. Participation While our target was 100 participants, we really had no idea how many would attend the live sessions. Each live session could accommodate up to 100 participants. We were assuming that possibly 5 to 50 participants would attend at each session, therefore we originally were targeting graduates of UofM only. Since we were offering free continuing education credits, we knew that some would come just for those particular sessions. Thus we begin to post about the free professional development and free continuing education credits to our social networks, reaching beyond our UofM alumni to all educators in our professional networks.
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Chapter 8: Presenter Preparation This chapter will focus on the conference breakout sessions. How they sessions were set up, the call for proposals, and the information given to presenters. Session Types The committee decided that we wanted the virtual conference to have similar session options that a face-to-face conference would have. Therefore, there were four types of available sessions: Panel, Lecture, Workshop or Poster. The Panel was devoted to discussion around a topic (often with multiple panelists). The Lecture was a more traditional format with one or two people presenting information. The Workshop was a how to format, where participants would be expected to participate in parts of the workshop as they were learning new technology. Finally, the Poster was for presenters who simply wanted to show a static poster (often through Glogster.com) about a project. Call for Proposal Submissions The committees goal was to get at least 20 proposals, therefore with only one month left before the call for proposals closed, but after the first month we had only received one proposal. With only a month left, we needed to do some more marketing of the conference. The committee decided to specifically target University of Michigan alumni that we knew were doing innovative activities with technology in their teaching. Most of the committee members each sent about 4 to 6 alumni emails asking them to participate. Almost all of the alumni responded and agreed to write proposals. In addition we began to send our more Tweets, emails and Facebook posts to our learning networks. Eventually by March 30th, we had 20 proposals. Since we only had 20 proposals we decide to accept all of them. While most were excellent and even the marginal ones were acceptable, there were a couple that we were a bit nervous about but decided to accept them anyway. Individual Session Evaluations We decided to have evaluations for each session so that we (and the presenters) could get immediate feedback on the sessions. This would also give the committee a sense of how the session was received and if we wanted to have the presenter(s) return for future conferences. For our evaluation tool we decided to use Google Forms. While there are many survey evaluation tools available online (Surveymonkey, Polldaddy, Wufooetc), we found the Google Forms was 100% free, so we did not have to limit questions or responses. Below is a copy of our session evaluation created with Google forms.
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Introduction of the Moderators The committee quickly realized that with 20 professional presenter sessions and 20 student teachers presenters we would need moderators for each session as the committee members could not be in every session and some were more tech-savvy than others. We wanted the conference experience to be pleasant and as seemless as possible for our presenters. We thought the UofM student teachers could moderate their own sessions since they were very familiar with Elluminate (they had been using it for a year), but many of the 20 professional presenters were presenting alone and had not used it before. Therefore, we decided to hire 4 moderators, who would each oversee about 5 sessions. We paid the moderators $50.00 per session from our grant money. We decided to hire our preservice teachers who were highly skilled with Elluminate. Beyond a little cash, it gave them an opportunity to network with current K12 teacher and administrators and enhance their professional credentials. By having moderators it meant that I and other committee members did not have to moderate every session (next to impossible with 3 or 4 sessions going at the same time). This freed me up to pop in and out of sessions and be available via phone for any last minute issues. I held a couple of virtual training sessions just for the moderators to give them their job
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descriptions and protocol for moderating the sessions. The moderators were in charge of.. 1. Sending an email to introduce themselves to the presenter 2. Holding practice sessions with the presenter (at a mutually decided time) 3. Uploading the presenters materials into the Ellumiante room 4. Introducing the session, the presenter and the basic elements of Elluminate for the participants (they were give a 4 slide protocol to follow for each session) 5. Handling any technical issues that the presenter or participants had during the session 6. Sending out the evaluation link for the session to all participants 7. Reminding participants about their CEU responsibilites Each moderator received four PowerPoint slides that they were expected to use at each presentation. The first slide had the 4T conference logo and the moderator filled in the Title and Presenter for the session. The second slide had a screenshot of the Elluminate interface. The moderator was expected to go over how to use Elluminate briefly for the participants of each session. The third slide had a map of the world, where the moderator would ask participants to select where they reside. The final slide was a simple thank you slide that included a link to the session evaluation. Each moderator was given a checklist protocol that they were expected to follow for each session.
4T Moderator Protocol Call or text Liz if you need help! Before Sessions Email your Presenters by May 13th Introduce yourself Tell them you will be introducing them via their bio that they submitted Offer to help upload materials, moderate chat room, answer Elluminate questions (send by May 21st) Ask them for any weblinks they are using in their presentation (send by May 21st) Remind them that you will be in their session 15-20 minutes before the presentation Remind them that they can practice with Elluminate via the link that was sent to them in their email. In Session o Log in 20 Minutes before the session begins o Upload Movies (firstthey take the longest) o Upload PowerPoint and Images o Upload Moderator PowerPoint (if not integrated into presenter PowerPoint) o Have weblinks ready to copy and paste to chat room o Test your microphone o Test your presenters microphone o Welcome participants as they enter (remind about CEUS---long in for all 60 minutes with full name)
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o o o o o o o o o o
Below are the four slides that each moderator used at the beginning of each session presentation. Slide 1: This slide was important so that each session would have a consistent look. The logo displayed clearly on the slide along with the title of the session, the presenter and the conference hashtag. When participants would log in to the room, they would know they were in the correct room because of this opening slide.
o o
Click on Record button if not already going Start on time (use timer if you like) Click on Mic Go over Moderator Introduction Slides Remind them that information for CEUs are posted on the 4T Conference Website Introduce the speaker (with bio) Click OFF the mic for yourself so the speaker can present Moderate chat room as needed (compile some questions that you can ask presenter at end if there is time) End of presentationclick on Mic and ask presenter questions (if time) Paste in link to presenter evaluation in chat room (Evaluation links for each presenter are in the Google Schedule on the 4T Schedule Page http://4tvirtualcon.soe.umich.edu/?page_id=54 ), find the link for your session and paste it into the chat room. Thank presenter and participants Reminder participants to close out of session
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Slide 2: This slide was set up to remind both participants and moderators to go over a few reminders (in particular for participants who wanted to apply for continuing education credits). We wanted to make sure the same information was given out for each session.
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Slide 3: This slide is an image of the Elluminate interface. The moderator would go over various pieces of the interface that the participants may be using during the session, such as the whiteboard tools, the chat room and the polling features. It was important that participants felt welcome, even the most novice of technology users, thus every session had a short 2 minute tutorial on how to participate in a session with Elluminate.
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Slide 4: This slide was an opportunity for participants to try some of the whiteboard tools (the magic wand in particular) and click on the state or continent where they reside. In addition, it set the tone that this conference session would be interactive and welcomes participation during the session. Finally, it gave us (the committee) some quick statistics on who was attending the session.
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Slide 5: This was our closing slide (the moderators put this up at the end of the presentation). Similar to the first slide, this slide was meant to give a consistent feel to the conference as well as a reminder to take the session evaluation.
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Elluminate training In addition to having moderators, the committee knew that more than half of the presenters had never used Elluminate before (we had this data from their proposal submission form). Wanting our presenters to feel comfortable in their virtual rooms we set up four live training sessions with Elluminate before the conference began. The live training sessions were offered as options to our presenters starting about two weeks prior to the conference. The sessions were held on different nights at different times in order to accommodate the presenters who lived in various time zones around the world. In addition the training sessions were recorded, thus any presenter who could not make it to a training session could still watch the recording. Furthermore, we had a page on our website with video tutorials on how to use the Elluminate rooms. We also set up a 24 hour practice room where presenters could login on their own as moderators and practice as much as they needed before their presentation. We emailed the link to the practice room as well as posted the link on the website. In addition we emailed some basic tips for using Elluminate. Tips and Hints for Presenting in the Virtual Room Login 15-20 prior to your presentation Upload movies and media first (as this will take a while) Check your microphone Test your screensharing and web tour if you plan on using these features 75
It is a good idea to have a back up in case screensharing does not work (such as screenshots in your PowerPoint slides of your presentation). Links will NOT work in the PowerPoint that is uploaded to Elluminate, copy and paste links into the chat room (they will become hot links there) Always wait 30 seconds after you ask a question or for participants to do something, it will take them some time to answer.
Email Updates In order to communicate conference happenings with our presenters we created an email list. The email list was easy to create from the Google form that the presenters used to submit their presentation proposal. One of the categories on the submission form was for email address. The presenters received email updates about once a week starting three weeks before the conference reminding them to register for the conference, to attend the Elluminate live training sessions, and included step-by- step reminders for their presentations. We also used MailChimp (http://mailchimp.com) to create free, visually appealing newsletters. In addition, MailChimp would allow us to track who was opening the newsletters and clicking on the links provided in the newsletters.
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Chapter 9: Preparing Participants Chapter 9 highlights how the committee prepared the participants to interact in the live virtual sessions. In addition to preparing our presenters to present in a live synchronous online room, we also needed to prepare our participants. Many of the participants stated they had never attended an online conference, let alone a live one. Therefore we included the following requirements or recommendations to help make the conference a smooth experience for our participants. Required but Easy Registration Despite the fact that the conference was free, we required registration. This is because we wanted to know how many educators had signed up for the conference, where they were from, and their email address. It was vital that we had the email addresses for two reasons. First, so that we could create a mass participant email list to easily communicate with participants. Second, so that we could use that list for future conferences to advertise and market to an interested audience. Yet, we did not want to deter potential participants by making it difficult to sign up for the conference, therefore we only asked a few simple questions in addition to the email addresses. We let people know that we were not phishing and would not sell or distribute any of their information. In order to persuade people to register, we password protected the archive recordings of sessions and only emailed out the live session links (and posted them in a password protected schedule). In order to receive the password, participants needed to register. Elluminate Test Rooms and Video Tutorials One of our goals was to make the conference easy to navigate, even for the most novice of technology users. Therefore, we knew we had to provide some tutorials and resources on Elluminate for our participants. Each participant was sent a link to our Elluminate tutorial page, where they were encouraged to try opening our Elluminate open test room on their computer BEFORE the conference began. That way they could see if Elluminate would work on their chosen computer and if they had trouble, they could troubleshoot the problem before the conference began. In addition there were video tutorial on how to use Elluminate. Step-by-Step Continuing Education Credits Information and Reminders Another draw for some participants was the ability to earn free continuing education credits. I created a webpage on the conference site devoted to step-by- step instructions on how to receive those credits. I also sent out emails before and after the conference with the instructions. In addition, the moderators were asked to remind participants about CEU protocol at the beginning of every session (this language was part of their moderator check list). Frequent Email Updates Similar to the presenters I sent numerous email updates to the participants. Beginning in May when the official conference schedule was posted (around May 77
1st), participants received about one email update per week before the conference. In addition, during the conference, they received one email a day with all the conference information for that particular day. Social Network Updates In addition to email reminders we also posted reminders via the conference Twitter and Facebook accounts. In some of our earlier emails to participants and on our conference blog we encouraged our participants to like our Facebook page and Follow our Twitter account in order to receive updates. Flexibility in Attendance Similar to a face-to-face conference, attendees could leave sessions that were not meeting their needs and enter sessions that were already in-session. Sessions did not lock out or lock in participants, so they were able and encouraged to find sessions that fit their interest and needs. Incentives for attending live and completing final conference evaluation form We wanted to make sure that we received some feedback from conference participants, in order to better select future sessions and provide a richer conference experience. Therefore we gave some incentives for participants to complete the evaluation form. First, participants who completed the final evaluation forms were automatically entered into our door prize lottery (we had premium accounts to give away from educational websites such as Prezi, Zooburst, and Weebly).
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Chapter 10: Evaluating Year 1 of the Conference We wanted to make sure that we received a lot of feedback about the conference as a whole, so that we could improve for the following year. Therefore, we decide to create a final conference evaluation and encouraged participants to take the survey, by offering incentives of free premium accounts to favorite educator web2.0 sites such as Zooburst, Weebly, Teacherweb, and Prezi. In order to get these door prize accounts I simply emailed each site (usually under the contact us) and asked them if they would be willing to donate some premium accounts. Most sites said yes and gave us anywhere from 3 to 15 free premium accounts to give away. In total we ended up with 33 premium accounts to give away. In return, we posted their logos and links to their webpages on our conference homepage and blog. Developing the Conference Evaluation We decided to use Google Forms, since we already used Google Forms for the individual session evaluations. In addition it is easy to copy and paste forms so we could use the same one for future conferences. It was important to get a sense of the demographic of educator that decided to participate in the conference. We were curious about teaching specialty, location, age and years in teaching. In addition we were curious about which sessions they choose to attend, and which sessions they enjoyed the most and least. We originally thought we would use some of our grant money to award best sessions to the K12 teachers or preservice teachers, so knowing which sessions rated the highest was also important for handing out our top session awards. Finally, we also wanted to get some feedback on why people choose to attend the conference, what they liked best and least, who applied for continuing education credits, if they will return next year, and any suggestions they might have for the conference committee. The following is a copy of the Google Forms survey that we sent out.
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Evaluation Feedback The evaluation feedback was overwhelmingly positive. We were shocked at how much participants enjoyed the conference experience. About 20% of the registered participants gave feedback in the final evaluation. Participant Demographics We ended up with 619 educators registered for the conference, much above our committees original goal of 100 registered participants for the conference. We were pleasantly surprised to see that the majority of participants had between 16 and 25 years of teaching experience. We had many more veteran teachers than new teachers. One reason may be that the veteran teachers needed the continuing education credits more than the newer teachers. These statistics also can dispel the myth that only younger teachers are tech savvy and interested or willing to integrate innovative technologies into their teaching and learning.
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Age Dont let the tech generation fool anyone, we had plenty of baby boomers attending this conference. As a matter of fact, the highest age range was between 50 and 55. There were some teachers in their 20s but far more teachers in their 40s through 50s.
Why did you attend conference? We were also interested in learning why participants chose to join the conference. The top answer was that participants liked that they could participate virtually. In addition, participants really liked the fact that the conference was free and were excited by the session topics that were offered.
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Applying for Continuing Education Credits We found that of the respondents, about 20% applied for the free CEUs. Overall we had 21 participants apply for the continuing education credits. We were surprised that more educators did not take advantage of the continuing education credits being offered (especially since they were free!).
Attending future conferences We were thrilled to see that 93% of respondents said they would definitely or possibly attend future conferences. Only 2 respondents said they absolutely would not. The two that stated that they would not attend again said that it was because the time of the conference was not conducive to their current schedules.
Most Favored Sessions
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While there was some disparity in which sessions were the most well received, in general there were some themes to the top-rated sessions. Qualities of favored sessions Practicality Since the conference was geared toward and attended mostly by K12 preservice and inservice teachers, the more practical sessions rated the highest. For example, sessions that included step by step or how to type guides, useful and free resources (but not too many lists of resources), or a strong K12 topical focus such as blogging with 2nd graders or setting up Glogster for literacy learning. Simplicity Sessions that had one theme as the focus were also given high marks. For example a session that completely focused on using Google Forms or on using cell phones with 7th graders were well received. Including K12 Students We only had a few sessions that included K12 students as presenters, but all of these sessions received high marks. In particular the comments spoke to really enjoying seeing the K12 students presenting their work and giving their perspective on using the education technology. Least Favored Sessions Research Heavy There were a few sessions that focused more on research in education technology rather than how to. These sessions tended to get lower marks, citing they were not useful or practical for K12 teachers. Sessions that were titled, Theories of gaming in the classroom would be an example of a research heavy and unpopular session. Lists of Resources Sessions that focused on lists of resources such as the top 15 web2.0 resources for teachers were given low marks. Again stating that while the sites were interesting, there was little presentation about how to use the sites in the k12 setting effectively. Trying to do too much There were a few sessions that had a practical focus but the presenters tried to squeeze too much information or activities into one session. It often overwhelmed the participants and many complained of having trouble keeping up with the presenter. Session Description did not Match Presentation
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A danger of any conference session (face-to-face or virtual) is the description of the session not matching what is presented. We had a few sessions where the participants felt duped by the session description. Ideas for improving the future conferences We also asked the participants to provide the committee with some ideas on improving future iterations of the conference. Below are summaries of suggestions made by participants to improve the conference. There were some concerns that the sessions would have been richer if the presenters had more training on Elluminate A few complained that there were not enough after school hour sessions and asked to have more evening sessions Rather than aligning conference sessions with National Educational Technology Plan, the sessions should align sessions with state and national technology and common core standards Many of the participants wanted the sessions to be organized by searchable keywords such as middle school, biology, Glogster rather than the type of session (such as panel, lecture, workshopetc). There was also a call to have the sessions begin over the weekend rather than weekday only sessions.
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Chapter 11: Mistakes and Mishaps Chapter 11 exposes some of the mistakes, mishaps and problems that occurred during the first year of the conference. While the first year of the conference did run fairly smoothly for the participants and presenters, there were some mishaps and problems that we will discuss in this chapter. The Live Sessions Below I will discuss some of the issues that arose during the live sessions. Presenters practicing sessions alone While we held four live tutorial sessions on Elluminate and had numerous open practice rooms, we did not anticipate that some of the presenters would practice alone (without a participant on the other end to corroborate what the presenter was showing was actually being seen by participants). Thus, when the presenter would screenshare or do a web tour on Elluminate, they assumed that participants would be able to see what they (as the presenter) were seeing. Unfortunately Elluminate can be quirky and does not always show participants what the presenter is viewing. Therefore, when the presenters where doing their official presentation some found that when they were screensharing their participants were unable to view the screenshare. This could have been easily fixed by asking each presenter to practice with someone else in the room (or to open the room on two different web browsers on the same computer). Many of the presenters who had this problem had to rely on the moderator to help them switch to a different way to present the data. In some presentations this occurred fairly smoothly, while in others it took valuable time. Too Many Participants A few sessions went over the maximum of 100 participants. This did not occur often but did occur and the participants that were not able to attend the live session were unhappy that they could not get in the virtual room. It did help that all the sessions were archived, so participants could watch the recording anytime they wish. However, if the participant was attending the session because they needed the continuing education credit from it, they had to attend the session live (this is a state of Michigan requirement for continuing education credits). There were 19 sessions that qualified for continuing education credits and participants had to attend 5 of those sessions for the entire session to qualify. Lack of Participants Another problem was that some sessions only had one or two participants. While we reminded the presenter that the sessions would be downloaded and watched many times from the archives, it was still disheartening to some presenters that all their hard work was only being viewed by a few participants. One future correction for this is to have fewer sessions (we had 49 sessions the first year, so for the second year we narrowed down to 40 sessions), and have all of the sessions qualify for 90
continuing education credits (this was a big incentive for many to attend certain sessions). Long Week We found that in the virtual world as in the face-to-face conference world, participant seems to wane by the end of the week. Thus, the first two days of sessions were packed full of participants, while the last day of sessions were only somewhat full. Our closing keynote only had 68 participants, while our opening keynote had well over 100, with many waiting to get into the room. While there is no easy fix for this problem, it does seem that spreading out the type of sessions over 4 days might be smart. We made some corrections for the second year (see chapter X). Long Days During some hours of the breakout sessions we had 5 sessions happening at one time. This was mostly because the presenter requested the particular time and we were trying to accommodate. However, the committee found that having more than 3 sessions operating at one timeslot brought participation in each session down greatly and was difficult to manage. Session Times Our sessions ran from 1:00pm EST to 11:00pm EST. In addition we decided to have sessions start toward the end of the eastern time zone school day (1:00pm EST) so that there could be room for some student participation in the sessions. We did get some negative feedback about this, some teachers complaining that they are teaching and cannot attend these sessions live (especially if they were sessions that qualified for continuing education credits). Yet, we did have decent participation in the 1:00 sessions, so that we feel they would be implemented again during our second year. We also should have stoped sessions at 10:00pm rather than 11:00pm. First, because it was a long day for the moderators and second because we did not have very good participation from 10:00 to 11:00pm EST. Pre-Conference Issues Participants and presenters brought up concerns about the conference even before it began. Below are some of those concerns. Association with UofM There were a few participants who emailed me and questioned whether or not the conference was associated with the University of Michigan since we were using a weebly website (and not a UofM proprietary one). One participant was worried that the registration was some sort of spam or phishing scheme where we were collecting email addresses to send out spam and sell to marketing websites. While we did have links back to the UofM School of Education homepage, we realized that the second year we would need to move the website from weebly to UofM. 91
Late Registration One problem that I did not anticipate was that some people would register after the conference had begun. Since I was sending out email communication by hand copying the email addresses into the participation email, I was not able to keep up with registrations that occurred during the conference. A few participants complained that they were not able to participate in many sessions because they did not receive their instructions until well after they had registered. This problem needed to be addressed and fixed in the second year by sending an auto-reply message to all conference participates who registered close to the start of the conference with specific instructions about participating in the conference so that they can start participating immediately. Another problem was that some people registered after the conference was over. They registered to have access to the archives (which were password protected, so one needed to register to get the password). I decided not to allow them the registration and then took the registration down (which we should have done on the last day of the conference). I thought it was unfair to those who had actively participated and it was a privilege of participating to have access to the archives. Elluminate Problems Despite my efforts to provide Elluminate training prior to the conference for participants, I still had a handful of participants contact me during the conference stating that Elluminate was not working on their computer. While I did not want to deter people from participanting it was difficult to manage individual Elluminate issues in the middle of conference sessions. Post-Conference Issues Session Descriptions There were two sessions that received horrible evaluations, mainly because the session description did not match the presentation. While this is a flaw that happens often in face-to-face conferencing, we needed to find ways to limit the possibility in the future. Awarding Sessions Originally the committee thought we would use some of the grant money to award the top 3 sessions with $200.00 classroom technology grants. We were going to use the responses from the final conference evaluation to determine the top 3 sessions. What we did not consider was that there would be a 7 way tie for the top 3 positions. Thus, we decided not to award any sessions because it was too complicated to figure out a fair and unbiased system. In addition, some of the most favorite sessions were also some of the least favorite sessions, which made it even more difficult to determine the winners. We did not tell participants or presenters that the award competition was happening so no corrective action was needed. Late CEUs
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Some participants did not send in the continuing education credit form until after the deadline (30 days), therefore they did not end up receiving CEUs. In addition, many registrants did not register with the state of Michigan and thus were not able to receive the CEUs (anyone can register with the state). I realized that I needed to give more explicit instructions for the second year for those interested in receiving CEUs.
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Chapter 12: Year 2 Modifications and Additions Changes While overall the committee was happy with the first year of our conference, we knew that we could improve upon the experience. We took the suggestions from the evaluations as well as some of our future goals and made some changes for the second year of the conference (May 2012). Changes we made to the website , the conference schedule, the call for proposals. Two new additions, an education job fair and an opportunity for sponsorship. From Weebly to Umich Some of the conference participants were concerned that the conference was not really associated with the University of Michigan since the website was hosted by Weebly and not UofM. Thus, we decided to move the website onto UofMs School of Education server and give it a UofM URL. Therefore the conference address became http://4tvirtualcon.soe.umich.edu. In addition, this meant that we could no longer use Weebly as our webpage editor. We had to move to WordPress. In reality, we would rather have stayed with Weebly, as it is simpler and in some ways, more robust than WordPress. While the conference still held a professional look, the WordPress editor was often clunky and did not work well with basic spacing (even when you adjusted the HTML). We found it much more frustrating to work with than the Weebly editor. If a school can use Weebly as their editor we highly recommend this option.
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Changes to Schedule Many of the participants suggested that we start on a Saturday, rather than Sunday night. Therefore the committee decided to begin on a Saturday with pre conference workshops offered on Saturday and Sunday from 9am EST to 4pm EST. Then we had our keynote speaker on Sunday night, with breakout sessions only on Monday and Tuesday (as opposed to the first year where we began Sunday night and had sessions Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday). This gave teachers more weekend options to participate. We had an average of 40 to 60 participants per weekend workshop session! For our second year of the conference we decided to use Google Calendar to set up the schedule for all the conference sessions. We set up two new public calendars, one for the sessions and one for the virtual job fair (explained later in chapter). This way when we embedded the calendar to our conference website, the job fair sessions would show up in a different color than the regular conference sessions. We ended up really liking the simple look and ease of navigation with our new
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Google schedule. But we realized that for each topic or strand to show up in a different color, we had to create separate Google Calendars for each strand.
Changes to Call for Proposals Many participants complained about the focus on the National Education Technology Plan, stating it was too far removed from the practicality of the conference. Instead of focusing on the National Education Technology Plan, we decided to rather to ask each presenter to select a target audience (such as K-3 educator, technology coordinator, social studies teachersetc) for their presentation. This seemed more practical and easier for participants to relate to something that would meet their particular needs. In addition we removed the poster session option. Only two presenters choose this session the first year and it was more difficult to host a poster session in the virtual world. We replaced the poster session with the lightening session, where multiple presenters could each present about 15 minutes on the same topic in one
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session. The lightening format seemed to work very well in the fast-paced virtual world. Presenter Training While we kept the basic protocol of our presenter training for the second year (4 live training sessions, recordings, and open room), we made sure to stress the importance of the presenter practicing with someone else in the room. Each moderator explicitly offered a private practice session with their presenters, where most of the presenters took advantage of this opportunity and stated that the private sessions were extremely helpful. Number of Sessions Our pilot had a total of 54 sessions. In the end we realized that 54 was too many for a virtual conference. At times we had 5 consecutive sessions at one time, which was difficult to manage and also spread participants very thin. Presenters who had few participants also complained that there were too many sessions happening at one time. Therefore, in the second year we decided to have between 42-45 sessions spread out over four days and no more than 3 sessions occurring concurrently. Continuing Education Credits While 19 of the 54 sessions offered continuing education credits (CEU), many participants let us know that they would like have more sessions qualify for CEUs. We noticed that the sessions that qualified for CEUs routinely had more participants then the sessions that did not. Therefore our second year our goal was to have every session qualify. Despite asking in the call for proposals, some presenters did not submit resumes (a requirement to qualify for CEUs) for the second year. Therefore we had many more sessions qualify for CEUs but not all of them (about 33 of the 40 sessions qualified). Additions to Conference Beyond some of the changes to our original format, we also added a few items in the conference. FAQs The committee decided to add a frequently asked questions page. I often received the same questions via email or via the comments on the website and thought it would alleviate some of these questions by having a page devoted to common questions and answers. As new questions came in, I quickly added them to the FAQ page.
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Virtual Education Job Fair One of our largest additions for the 2nd year of the conference was a pilot for a virtual job fair. Since the 4T Conference is targeted at practitioners as well as teachers in training, we wanted to give both an opportunity for career networking. In our second year of the conference we decided to add a virtual job fair. While the University of Michigan has a face-to-face education job fair every Spring, we learned that there are many schools outside the state of Michigan who want to participate in the face-to-face job fair but are unable to for cost or travel purposes. In addition to the K12 schools outside of the state, we thought a perfect target for our virtual conference would be the many virtual K12 schools that have been developing and growing all over the U.S. We contacted six different schools, 4 virtual schools and 2 face-to-face schools. Five of them wanted to participate in our pilot virtual job fair. We did not charge any fees for the schools to participate, nor did we charge fees for the students to participate in the job fair. Each school submitted a short description
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of their school, the certification areas that they were interested in hiring, as well as links and photos. All of this information was compiled on a virtual job fair page in the 4T conference website. We asked each school to present a 30-minute webinar about their school, highlighting the benefits to both students and teachers. At the end of their webinar, the participants (perspective employees) could ask questions and get further information. The perspective employees were asked to submit their resume and ePortfolios about a week before the conference, so each school could select a number of the applicants to interview live via a private Elluminate room for about 20 minutes during the conference. The virtual job fair was a bit rough, the schools had never participated in a virtual job fair and were pretty green about their approach to the webinars. In addition, we found that many of the schools went ahead and contacted the applicants on their own and did not need to interview during the job fair. We are going to keep the job fair our third year, but we are going to change the format a bit. Each school will present a 30 minute webinar and at the end take applications for interviews (which they can conduct on their own). It was very difficult to mediate between the schools and the applicants (and a lot of unnecessary work!).
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Sponsorship While the first year we were able to secure a small internal grant to pay for moderators and speaker fees as well as any Internet resources or website fees. Thus in our second year we wanted to find a way to include a small number of sponsors in order to allow the conference to begin paying for itself. Our conference sponsor goal is $2000.00 per year. We had two options, one was to ask many sponsors to donate a small amount or find one or two sponsors to donate a large lump sum. Therefore we decided to offer the following
Dear SchoolDude On behalf of the University of Michigan School of Education, I am delighted to offer SchoolDude a sponsorship opportunity at our upcoming virtual conference focused on technology-enhanced teaching. The conference, 4TVirtualCon: Teachers Teaching Teachers about Technology, will take place May 19-22. 4TVirtualCon is offered free of charge to all educators, features more than 40 sessions, and includes access to archives of all live sessions. We will cover topics such as Web2.0 for all grades, using iPads and iPods, flip classrooms, online learning, social media, and technology integration in mathematics, literacy, and preschool
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instruction. Sponsorship of this conference offers visibility with over 600 K-12 teachers, school administrators, and educational technology specialists. Our conference participants are eager to hear about new resources and include hundreds of decision-makers for schools and districts. We have designed sponsorship packages that we believe maximize exposure and effectively educate participants about our sponsors? products. This year we are offering three levels of sponsorship: Platinum Sponsorship $1,000 (only 2 of these allowed for the conference!) -Advertisement on all email communication sent out about conference -Advertisement banner on homepage of the conference -Sponsorship recognition mentioned before and after the opening and closing Keynote sessions -First right of refusal to be one of the two platinum sponsors at the 2013 conference -All benefits included in the basic and premium sponsorship packages Premium Sponsorship $500 -1-hour live webinar product presentation -Post on the conference blog -All benefits included in the basic sponsorship package Basic Sponsorship $250 -Video or live advertisement at the beginning of a conference session (to be chosen by SchoolDude) -Company logo on the conference website -Recognition on the conference Facebook page and in conference tweets We would be honored to feature SchoolDude as a sponsor of 4TVirtualCon. I think you will be very pleased with the audience you are able to reach through this conference. If you have any questions or require additional information, I welcome you to contact me. I hope to have your response by May 3, if possible. Thank you for considering this proposal. Sincerely, Elizabeth Keren-Kolb, Ph.D. Coordinator of 4TVirtualCon http://4tvirtualcon.soe.umich.edu School of Education University of Michigan
Unfortunately no businesses decided to sponsor us. We received very positive feedback, that we were offering a nice package but many of the educational technology start-up companies that we targeted did not have any funds for marketing. A few mentioned that they would be interested in sponsoring the following year if their businesss budget would allow for it. While we realized that we could go to larger companies and even local companies, we really wanted the sponsorship to reflect the mission of the conference (see the next chapter for details on future sponsorship plans). Note for the local K12 schools considering a virtual conference: In reality, I believe that many local school districts would have an easier time with local sponsorship as many local businesses would be happy to chip in a few dollars for their K12 schools to support the students and teachers.
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Chapter 12: The Future While our pilot of the 4T conference went better than expected, and the 2nd year was even stronger, we knew that we had many areas to improve upon and many new ideas to enact. Improvements: The alumni rooms These were incredibly unsuccessful. Despite having over 100 alumni attending the conference, not one of them attended any of the alumni rooms. We still would like to have a virtual meet up for alumni, but realized that having a random room opened for one hour at night is not the best way to attract alumni to reconnect. For the third year of the conference we decided to have ONE session that was a birds of a feather where only University of Michigan alumni and current students are invited to attend. This is a way to network, reconnect with alumni from different years. In addition some UofM goodies will be given out as door prizes to anyone who was willing to present. Training One of the criticisms from the final evaluations (from both year 1 and year 2) was that some of the presenters did not seem very well trained with Elluminate. While the criticisms were not concerning any of the preservice teachers sessions (they had extensive training as part of their UofM teacher education program), it was important that we find a way to give better training and retraining to the presenters so both they and their participants could have a smooth experience. We originally thought that by having a moderator in each session to assist would solve any lack-of skills the presenter may have, we realized that a moderator was not enough. Therefore, in addition to the four live synchronous training sessions (these are optional and not required), we are going to ask each moderator to have a training session with their presenter. K12 Student Presentations In our pilot year of the conference we only had one presentation that included K12 students. The second year of the conference we had two sessions with K12 students. All of these were incredibly successful and well-received presentations. Some of the feedback from the conference evaluations asked for more sessions that included the K12 students showcasing their technology projects and ideas. Therefore, for our second year of the conference, we wanted to integrate more sessions that included K12 students. One of the problems of integrating K12 students into the sessions was that our session times were mostly focused after school hours. For this reason we decided to keep the sessions beginning at 1:00pm EST so that if students wanted to participate they could with the assistant of their teachers at their school. In order to encourage K12 students to participate we added a category in the call for presentations asking if they were going to have any
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K12 students participate in the presentation, and that we encouraged these types of collaborative presentations. Unfortunately the webpage devoted to K12 student submissions did not bring about many submissions. For our second year of the conference, we only had 3 sessions that included K12 students. Therefore our solution to this problem for the 3rd year of the conference is to partner with a local school district and feature that school districts students and their teachers presenting innovative technology integration lessons. Fortunately we have a committee member who is a technology teacher in a local school district and will work with us to make this student showcase for our third year. We hope to have short 15-minute student showcase presentations between sessions (since there is a 30 minute break between sessions). We may record the student presentations, since many of our conference sessions run in the evening hours (Eastern Time) and it would be more difficult to organize live student sessions at 10:00pm EST on a weeknight! Sponsorship After our unsuccessful attempt to get education technology companies to sponsor the 4T Conference, we have decided to take another approach. One of our committee members Laura Roop had an idea. Therefore, our goal for the third year of the conference is to approach the local intermediate school districts and ask them to each chip in about $500 for the conference. This sponsorship would benefit the local ISDs in various ways. First, we would allow all of their district educators to attend the conference and receive CEUs for free (the third year of the conference we decided to only pay for CEUs for University of Michigan alumni since the cost of the CEUs had gone up to $10.00 per person---this could get expensive if 100s of educators applied for the CEUs). Second, by allowing access to all of the archived recordings of the conference, the ISDs would be able to share those with their district teachers to further support their goal of professional development. This would allow the ISDs to pay less for individual professional development sessions at their ISD (which can cost well over $1,000.00 a session). Finally, it gave the ISD a chance to partner and networking with the University of Michigan, School of Education. In addition, the ISDs would help advertise the conference, which in turn would bring in more participants. Course Credit One of our goals that the committee had been tossing around since the first year is the idea of teachers earning course credit for attending and interacting with the virtual conference. We are hoping to offer 1 course credit in education technology for inservice teachers, where they would attend specific workshops and then develop a project, participate in readings and reflections based on the ideas from the workshops. We did not implement this idea for the second year of the conference, but we hope to develop this idea for the third year of the conference. Our course credit idea:
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The course will be conducted through the University of Michigan, School of Education Title: Becoming a Virtual Teacher: Fundamental Strategies and Management for Teaching Online Description:
This course explores the fundamentals of synchronous online teaching. Participants will have an interactive experience where they will evaluate online courses and create online courses. The course culminates in the 4T Virtual Conference where participants will moderate and evaluate the online synchronous sessions. The course allows educators to practice skills to support student achievement in the online synchronous environment.
Student Teaching Grants In addition to the sponsor money going toward basic conference fees, we would like to offer small student teaching grants to preservice teachers who would like to integrate technology into their teaching but need some funding to assist in the implementation. While there are numerous small grant options for inservice teachers, it is harder for preservice teachers to find education technology grants for their preservice teaching. One of the larger complaints we hear from student teachers is the lack of technology resources and PD at their student teaching placements. Depending on sponsorship, we hope to begin by offering 2 grants of $500.00 or 1 grant of $1,000. We hope to have preservice teachers apply for the grants in the Fall, and the receive and use the grant during their Winter student teaching term. As part of the grant, we will ask the student teachers to present their
It will be offered as a Masters Level Course (since most educators at the conference already have a Bachelors degree). The topic of the course will be about: Teaching and learning online The course will begin about 3 weeks before the conference (the beginning of the Spring term). 1 credit course (14 contact hours) The course will meet virtually (thus anyone in the world could attend) once a week for two hours The course will spend the first 3 weeks covering the topics of (6 contact hours): Introduction to online learning (blended and virtual options) Introduction to teaching online (synchronous, asynchronous) Research on types of virtual tools for online learning Teachers will learn about best practices of online teaching in a live synchronous room Conference Week: No virtual meeting during conference, instead attend 3 sessions and present their own (4 contact hours) Teachers will develop a virtual session for the 4T conference and present at the conference Teachers will be required to attend at least 3 sessions during the conference and evaluate them online experience Post Conference: Meet virtually for 2 more 2 hour session (4 contact hours) Teachers will evaluate data from conference Teachers will present conclusions on virtual teaching
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project at the 4T Virtual Conference in May. Over time we hope to build on this and offer more grants for preservice teachers interested in using technology in their student teaching.
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References: Ball, D.L. & Cohen, D. K. (1999). Developing practice, developing practitioners: toward a practice-based theory of professional development. In L. Darling Hammond & G. Skyes (Eds.), Teaching as the learning professional: Handbook of policy and practice. (pp. 3-32). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Harwell, S. (2003). Teacher Professional Development: Its Not an Event, Its a Process. CORD. Retrieved: http://www.cord.org/uploadedfiles/HarwellPaper.pdf Hrastinski, S. (2008). Asynchronous and Synchronous E-Learning: A study of asynchronous and synchronous e-learning methods discovered that each supports different purposes. Educause Quartly. 31(4). Retrieved: http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVo lum/AsynchronousandSynchronousELea/163445 Joyce, B., & Showers, B. (2002). Student achievement through staff development. Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Hunzicker, J. (2011). Effective Professional Development for Teachers: A Checklist. Professional Development in Education. 37(2) 177-179 Loucks-Horsley, S., & Matsumoto, C. (1999). Research on Professional Development for Teachers of Mathematics and Science: The State of the Scene. School Science and Mathematics, 99(5). National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century. (2000). Before its too late: A report to the nation from the National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century. http://www.ed.gov/americacounts/glenn/report.doc Odden, A. & Archibald, S. (2000). Reallocating Resources: How to Boost Student Achievement Without Asking For More. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc.
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Building A Free Virtual Conference For K-16 Schools

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Building A Free Virtual Conference For K-16 Schools

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A Guide To Building a Free Virtual Conference for K-16 Schools

By Liz Kolb, Ph.D. Clinical Assistant Professor University of Michigan 2013

Yes Yes but you must pay for it No

Ability to present live, real-time synchronous to any place in the world

File sharing options (send files to participants)

X (yes but need separate accounts)

Yes Yes but you must pay for it No

Ability to present live, real-time synchronous to any place in the world

must screen share)

File sharing options (send files to participants)

X (yes but need separate accounts)

Yes Yes but you must pay for it No

Ability to present live, real-time synchronous to any place in the world

Yes Yes but you must pay for it No

Ability to present live, real-time synchronous to any place in the world

can pre- record webinars)

X(yes, but not

X X(yes, but, not live) X(can download presentation)

Yes Yes but you must pay for it No

Ability to present live, real-time synchronous to any place in the world

(but you must

screen share, cannot upload)

Mobile App? Limit on Length of Meetings/Webinars?

X Skype and teleconferencing Options X up to 30 X can

purchase unlimited time

Yes Yes but you must pay for it No

Ability to present live, real-time synchronous to any place in the world

The ability to take attendance at the sessions for SB CEU credits

X X X (as a report at end)

Yes Yes but you must pay for it No

Ability to present live, real-time synchronous to any place in the world

have to pay for more than 10 per room)

X X X X X X X (if you pay,

Yes Yes but you must pay for it No

Ability to present live, real-time synchronous to any place in the world

need to set them up ahead of time)

Yes Yes, but limited

Yes Yes Yes, but must upgrade to premium

Yes Yes Yes

Yes Yes Yes

Conference Sessions At A Glance

Wednesday May 25th

Learning Intensive Storybird for with Classes Collaborative Technology

Mobile Devices in and Beyond the Classroom

Teachers Teaching Teachers

Most Favored Sessions

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