Course Meeting 1

Dr Samuel Johnson once used this simile of a dog walking on its hind legs (to illustrate some sexist point or other):"… It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." I didn't feel that my teaching was at its best yesterday evening when we had our first proper teaching session on Kamimo … but I think the students got by very well.

There are still uncertainties in the exact class list. One student popped up out of nowhere at about 4.00 pm yesterday (there have clearly been some problems with the on-line application procedure) and turned up quite out of the blue about halfway through the lesson. Another student appeared late too, with the voices of his kids coming across loud and clear! However, this is about par for the course with an ICT-based distance course - the administrative procedures surrounding them are still back in the dark ages.

I can see, though, that students are going to need a touch more specific instruction about setting sound levels, etc. Not much, but some. I gave two of the participants last night on-the-hoof instructions about how to get voice chat going, and it worked fine, but I could equally well have directed them to a web page in advance with the same instructions on it.

We followed the lesson planning more or less exactly. There were just two activities which switched places (breaking in and active listening). I also demanded less of the students when it came to making their own presentations, but concentrated instead on getting them used to the environment, and getting used to the idea that there is a different pattern of social interaction in English when it comes to listening and speaking in more informal groups.

The video recording worked fairly well. SnapzPro also behaved itself, but I restricted each recording to just over 10 minutes to create smaller file sizes. Then it took at least 10 minutes for each Quicktime movie to be processed and saved. The net result was that I managed to make four files of about 12 minutes each during a 120-minute lesson (i.e. not quite half). I'll experiment with SnapzPro when I'm off line to see what happens when you make a two-hour recording (I suspect that it's not going to work, since 12 minutes = 1.2GB).

I used my 'on-line lessons' kitchen timer to make sure I kept to my times too - it's very easy to lose track of time when you're on line.

I'll make another post about lessons learned.