Tag Archives: presentation

Mahara at MoodleMoot.de 2012

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Last week, the German MoodleMoot 2012 took place in Münster. Sigi Jakob-Kühn organized the session entitled “Mahara-Netzwerk – Austauschworkshop für Akteure und Neugierige”.

I was honored to have been asked by her to give a virtual presentation and be available for Q&A afterwards. Thankfully, Sigi could get a time slot that was not too bad for NZ time. Thus, I could stay for the entire session and learn how Mahara is being used in Germany and in Austria by schools and universities through mini presentations.

This event showed me that I should practice presenting in German more as I stumbled through some of the words and sentences more than I would have wished for. Being used to speaking English all day, I am a bit rusty in German. Following the presentations of members of the audience was much easier. :-)

Mahara 1.5 steht for der Tür

There’s also a recording of my presentation which includes the 2 minutes that I could not be heard in Germany due to Skype losing its connection and me not realizing it as I was in presentation mode.

Oskar-von-Miller Schule Kassel

Claudia Schmidt reported how the Oskar-von-Miller Schule in Kassel uses Mahara. The students keep their electronic portfolio in Mahara and use it as basis for face-to-face discussions with their teachers. They have certain activities to fulfill that they post on their pages.

The students also keep an application portfolio with which they school has had great success (after a great deal of convincing of potential employers to consider them).

Pädagogische Hochschule Wien

Thomas Strasser showcased how his students use Mahara to document their experience of their student teaching for their practical studies. They do not only use one type of portfolio, but depending on the purpose, there are three types that are important:

  • showcase / presentation portfolio
  • reflection portfolio
  • process portfolio

They experiment with a number of ideas from the Mahara 1.4 Cookbook to make the portfolio work more relevant for the students. The portfolio is not seen as assessment portfolio but rather as vehicle for giving constructive feedback and discuss it with peers instead of just with an instructor. They also emphasize social interaction and encourage their students to publish hobbies and special interests on their profile pages for others to discover and connect with them.

Language Center of the University of Leipzig

Kátia Aiko Murata Arend outlined how she uses Mahara with her Portuguese language students. She uses it with her students to collect and reflect on texts for media and text analysis thus keeping all her teaching and learning material in Mahara. The students add to that throughout the semester and are highly motivated using this medium in their studies.

KAMahara in Karlsruhe

Norman Mewes and Sigi provided some examples of how they use Mahara in the school context. KAMahara is a Mahara installation for a project which is used by a number of schools to explore its potential.

Students use the ePortfolio to apply for jobs, for example. They also do not wait to make their pages available to their teachers until they have finished their portfolio, but give them access throughout the development process to invite feedback and improve their showcase portfolio which they are going to use for their job application along the way.

Sigi showed us a couple of examples highlighting students who use Mahara to document and reflect upon their internships in the real world. She showed how different the portfolios of the students can be depending on the preference of the students and how they wanted to express themselves.

During the MoodleMoot, a number of presenters had another presentation slot in which they went into more detail regarding their use of Mahara. But already these brief showcases allowed me a glimpse into how Mahara is being used in German schools and German and Austrian universities. The variety of uses is fantastic and also the getting together of the practitioners to share their ideas and discuss them with each other.

Library services in a time of crisis

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When Richard Liddicoat had signed up for a presentation at the South Island Children’s and Young Adult’s Librarians’ Conference at the beginning of March, he didn’t think he would be shaken up by a second earthquake in his hometown Christchurch that surpassed the September 4, 2010, one. February 22, 2011, will be in every New Zealander’s memory as the biggest catastrophe in a very long time.

Though Richard, his family and colleagues experienced a huge tragedy, their lives go on and thus, he had decided to give his presentation about how a library can use the internet to bring in library users just over a week later in Blenheim. But before he launched into his presentation, he also mentioned how the earthquake has changed the City Council’s and the library’s web presence. As they host their web sites in Christchurch, they were disconnected and needed to get information to their citizens through other channels. Twitter and Facebook accounts were quickly established to keep the flow of vital information going. Furthermore, they used their blog Christchurch City Libraries Bibliofile that is hosted on wordpress.com to convey where people can find information.

The rest of Richard’s presentation was also very interesting because he made a point in case of using the internet to attract patrons and non-patrons to their library and to engage them, especially kids, so that they become interested in reading and actually stepping a foot into the library. He demonstrated how important a web presence is but also at the same time how much effort goes into the well-run and up-to-date internet site of the ChCh City Libraries of which he is the head of the editing team. For example, they plan their content three months in advance, have writing style guidelines and training available.

As not every public library can afford a team just for their internet site, he also gave tips of what every library could do with little money.

You can view Richard’s presentation on the Bibliofile web site.

ULearn – ready, set, go

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This week, well today till Friday, is conference week. Hundreds of teachers are traveling to Christchurch to attend ULearn. Although there are still frequent aftershocks, 20 alone during the last 24 hours with one being measured at 5.0, most are minor, and I didn’t even feel the one just at 11:36 a.m. The Christchurch Quake Map is a fantastic though horrific visualization of all the quakes that have happened since September 4, 2010.

I flew in rather early today thinking that I needed to be at a workshop, but that engagement was canceled. Thus, I take the time to work and put the finishing touches on my Mahara workshop which will take place tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. Christ’s College, where my breakout session will take place, has great computer labs. It should be fun to explore Mahara with the 25 participants tomorrow.

A great aside: We have fantastic sunny spring weather and the forecast says it stays that way until Friday. :-)

Later today we will set up our “Open Source Schools” stand in the exhibitor hall (stand #20) where I will be found for most of the time till Friday. Conference participants can win a Flip camera. More info will be available at the stand.

Let the conference begin!

imMEDIAte TEACHing goes on

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From 25-27 February 2010 I was at the AKS-Tagung in Bochum, Germany. I was invited to give a brief presentation on the project “imMEDIAte TEACHing” for which I had worked at LMU München a few years ago. In particular, the organizers of the workshop “Lifelong learning also for language teachers?!” were interested in our concept for a language teacher training program.

These are the slides that I used for the presentation. More details can be found in the “notes” section below the slides directly on the slideshare web site. They should make it a bit easier to understand the presentation. If you cannot see the embedded presentation, view it here.

Das Weiterbildungskonzept von imMEDIAte TEACHing

I liked the new concept of this conference very much. Everybody had to choose one specific workshop in which s/he stayed the entire time. No “workshop hopping” as is so frequent at other conferences. Thus, the workshop participants could get to know each other better and could really discuss the proposed issues over the three conference days. We had 4 ca. 15-minute presentations and the rest of the time for discussions and group work.

At the end we were very pressed for time to generate a presentation of our workshop results. Luckily, our workshop organizers, Sigrid Behrent (University of Paderborn) and Gunter Lorenz (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg) had already categorized most of the results the previous night. It was too bad that there was only little time to view the results of the other workshops. If this conference concept is continued, I would prefer to have a specific time slot for brief summaries from the workshops besides the slides or posters because then these could be put into context better, and it would be possible to see the connections between the individual workshops more clearly.

The biggest results from the workshop for me are the following:

  • Continuously training language teachers is necessary (nothing new there) and is done differently at individual institutions. Some have in-house workshops, others organize external trainers, others have a mix, but many do not have any scheme in place.
  • Sharing resources and workshop facilitators between language centers will help to offer a wide range of workshops. Language centers should try to pool their resources and see if they can profit from their respective expertise.
  • Any training program should be accredited to command respectability and offer real value to the participants for future employment (especially for freelance teachers) and professional development in general. Other professions already have such certificates – why not language teachers in higher education in Germany?
  • The idea behind “imMEDIAte TEACHing” is still current and provides a good ground for discussions to venture off to new grounds.
  • We have set up the AKS-NetworkING space where the discussions can be continued, resources shared, etc. The conference was just the start for the actual work.

Participants’ participation in an online conference

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George Siemens presented today at LearnTrends 2009 on “Finding New Points of Balance”. In his presentation, which was attended by 120 participants on average, he employed a very nice online presenter technique. He offered (almost) empty slides encouraging participants to drop their ideas on them and thus engaging in the presentation more than just through the backchannel.

I had already seen that others had done this before. Recently, Dave Cormier wrote a good post on this method that he also tried for one of his presentations with great success entitled “Presenting with live slides“.

This technique is great to interact more with participants and to bring in their voice. Of course, one could use the backchannel or the audio chat. However, by putting everything on a slide, the contributions become part of the presentation visuals, and the presenter can use the ideas more easily than if he had to sift through the chat log which can move rather quickly with a large group.

The slides that George provided were filled quickly because he had approx. 120 other minds chiming in and bringing ideas forth.

In a way, this session showed that online conference sessions can be more engaging than f2f conference sessions because everybody can participate at any time by using the backchannel without interrupting the speaker. By offering a white slide for putting down ideas, people will do so actively and I had the feeling more willingly than in an auditorium where we would have had to raise our hands and shout our ideas to the podium where the speaker may not even have heard them. It was also suggested that the nature of the writing on the whiteboard assisted the involvement as it was anonymous.

One slide from Georges slide deck on which we participants put down our ideas on the continuum of using online tools for learning.

One slide from George's slide deck on which we participants put down our ideas on the continuum of using online tools for learning.