A “webinar” is a web seminar — it is what happens when a group participates in a conference call while they interact on a web site. Web conferencing has become a popular way for business people to attend meetings if they do not have the time or money to travel. They are also proving a useful way to get high-quality teaching materials into schools that need them.
In December 2005, NSDL and the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) offered free online professional development workshops for K-12 science and math teachers in hurricane-damaged schools, and also for teachers who were serving students who had been displaced by the storms. Textbooks and other basic materials were scarce, so teachers were shown how to find materials online, and also how to sign up for various distance learning opportunities.
This year, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and NSDL have teamed up to offer a series of free webinars to anyone who registers for them. The first of these, in mid-May 2006, was about hurricanes and was based on resources from DLESE. After an introduction to the technology, 59 participants from 23 states learned about ocean surface temperature, wind patterns, and the other ingredients that make hurricanes possible. They also visited pages on DLESE that measure these phenomena. Participants were given several chances to interact and ask questions. At one point, volunteers were given latitude and longitude coordinates and used personalized markers to plot the course of a storm across the Caribbean while the group watched.
“It was a big hit,” says Susan Van Gundy, Director of NSDL Education and Outreach, who co-presented the material with Robert Payo and coordinated the conference. One participant said, “”I really enjoyed hearing the presentation instead of just reading information.” Another said, “Learning about the digital library system search engines was great – and it is marvelous that they are free.”
The webinars continue; a session on September 26 is devoted to birds, another on October 11 is on skeletons, and a third on November 30 is on plate tectonics. Plans are also in the works for webinars by the Shodor Educational Foundation, Exploratorium, and others. The series continues to extend fresh educational resources to Gulf Coast schools that are still recovering from the storms of 2005 — but anyone can participate, as long as they pre-register.
A wonderful article, it’s great to see the use of technology going even a little way to help those affected by the hurricane.
If I may just introduce myself, my name is Richard Butler and I come from the beautiful old English city of Winchester.
My wife is a teacher and I am working in conjunction with a company to try and introduce Webinars as an everyday learning tool into some British schools- do you have any hints and tips which we could use to help our kids have a better educational experience? If you do, an email would be greatly appreciated!
Richard: Thanks for your comment. My name is Robert Payo (rpayo@nsdl.ucar.edu) I oversee the web seminars that NSDL is doing in partnership with NSTA. We have found these seminars to be a great way to connect with teachers and to provide them with a means of connecting teachers to experts in the NSDL community and the resources associated with NSDL. One of the most common things teachers favorably comment on about the seminars is the level of interactivity that is embedded into each of these presentations.
Participants not only learn new content, but are engaged in the presentation through the use of web seminar tools such as polls, quizzes, stamping their answers on the presenters’ slides, or discussing a topic on the online chat. It’s hard to gauge an audience when you are not in a face to face situation and this interactivity allows for the audience to feel involved in what is happening. It can also be a tool for getting feedback from the audience or as a mechanism to check participants’ understanding of concepts or getting them to use the information to integrate what they are learning.
Another aspect that has been useful in using this format is the use of a moderator. The moderator, myself in the case of our series, keeps things moving along, prompts questions from the audience, and moderates the chat. The chat also allows the moderator to create a more personable experience for the participants. I often respond to the participants with encouraging words or reflect on what they are writing. This allows for more one-on-one contact with audience members. With any online experience, establishing connection and community is important. People like to feel like they belong since it would be very easy for them to disconnect or disengage from the group if they chose to do so.
I think the same notions would hold for students as they do for teachers. Students are certainly more savvy with the technology, and there is great potential to build upon what is learned from a web seminar and extend it into the classroom as well as using web 2.0 technologies to assist. You can find some reflections on the web seminar experience of pre-service teachers from Texas A & M where one of the presenters of our seminar on electrostatics teaches on the blog associated with that seminar: >. Coming fresh out of university, they have newer perspectives on the use of such technologies and how it would apply for their classrooms.
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