The Web Conference

As an add-on to our normal class activity, our instructor organized a web conference with an English teacher, who accepted to be interviewed about the field of New Media in the ESL classroom. For this purpose we used the tool Acrobat Connect Pro from Acrobat.

Each student got a login and as I logged in, I could already see and hear my instructor in a small frame in the top right corner. The program is similar to skype, but far more professional and equipped with different functions. In a web conference the host has the possibility to grant mike-rights to the participants, meaning that he or she can give someone permission to speak to the group. In this way it is easy to control who is an active speaker for a point in time. This is crucial as normal conversational cues that are present in a face-to-face interaction are absent. Other functions like raising a hand, showing a thumb up or down are also available.

Matthias Heil is a teacher for catholic religion and English at the Winfriedschule school in Fulda . He is involved in a number of projects dealing with the matter of New Media in the field of education.

In the conference Mr Heil talked about some projects he conducted with his pupils at his school. We could ask questions about the different tools and procedures he explained to us and was happy to share his screen so that we could have a look at some of the features of the websites he used. Among these was a  project  on the book “About a Boy” by Nick Hornby with “google text und tabellen”, where the children could cooperate with one another to create a summary of the book. He underlined the great possibilities of the tool and recommended it for use in the classroom. In the chat though, another teacher said, that he had made some bad experiences with google tools where he lost all the content of one of his projects in the past.

Concerning data protection Mr Heil said that he censors a lot of the content that the pupils put online. He pointed out that the protection of the children’s data is very important and that it is not allowed to track their history data while dealing with a certain project, meaning you cannot check how long a specific pupil has worked on a given task. Other than that, there had been no concerns from the parents of kids that were involved in working on the web.

As the conference proceeded the English teacher showed the group a Prezi on digital storytelling which was very interesting for me personally as I had been working on the topic during the semester. He even incorporated some of the tools we used as Xtranormal.com (include link) among many others.

I really liked the experience of the web conference and enjoyed the input that I got from Mr Heil. I have used skype before, yet, it felt different to talk to someone official for a change. I quite liked the loose atmosphere and I had the impression that this web conference fitted in really well in the topic of New Media. By applying this way of communication we could talk to an experienced teacher without arranging a real life meeting. Eventually, I was quite taken with the information and the sheer amount of websites and tool Mr Heil provided us with. He seemed to be fully engaged in the field of modern technology in the classroom and therefore listening to him was inspiring – even though it was hard to follow sometimes as there was just too much to grasp at one time.

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