I’m back at Cypris!!! I decided to try a new time for me. Saturday night, midnight SL time! That will catch many learners in Europe on Sunday morning, and further east later in the day. I had a good turn out this time.
I could tell I was a bit out of practice. I wasn’t prepared to have so many people, but having a new tool made it fun for them. I used Typewith.me to take notes during the lesson. Since I wasn’t showing any images in a viewer in SL, we didn’t have to go back and forth from the SL viewer to web browser too much. Each learner had the opportunity to contribute to the notes. With each learner having their own color assigned, it made for a very colorful end product!
I showed them how to export the notes for their review. I also showed them the timeline feature so they could see how it was built. I asked them how they liked Typewith.me and they all said it was great. They especially liked that they could keep it for future use/review.
Lessons learned:
- I noticed at one point, the document tended to replace the conversation. It became a fancy text chat room. But I did notice one learner, who is rather shy, was typing a lot. I was sure to ask her follow-up questions about what she typed. I can see how this could help shy or quiet students contribute when they really don’t want to speak up.
- One of the learners figured out how to strike through the words in the word bank as we went along. About half way through the exercise I noticed someone had done that. That could be one person’s job during an activity like that. I thought that was very clever of her!
I’ll still need to experiment with how to use it and how not to use it. The gap-fill activity was fun, but took a long time. The end product was very colorful and fun.
Here’s a screenshot from the end of the lesson.
