Thursday, November 08, 2007

TRETC Session 3 - netTrekker DI and other web resources


I'm not above a bit of shameless self-promotion, so I will review the third session of the day that I attended, which just happened to be one that I did. After having experienced a similar session at the Classrooms for the Future Coach Boot Camp in September, I wanted to co-present virtually. Dawn Crawford, Customer Relationship Specialist for netTrekker, was the virtual co-presenter and mastermind behind the presentation.
I had a nice-sized group in a PC lab that was able to follow along with what Dawn and I were searching for/manipulating the results of search results for in netTrekker. When Dawn spoke, she had control of the microphone, whiteboard, etc in an Elluminate vRoom I had signed up for only a week or two prior. (If you'd like your own vRoom from Elluminate, start here).
I liked that Dawn and I had to collaborate and cooperate via a virtual classroom space like Elluminate; I liked that the participants were working on a lot of different levels at the same time: attending to the presentation content, attending to one presenter in the room and one that was not, and attending to the results they got through this robust academic search engine.
I definitely want to do this again, at other conferences, and even during professional development sessions at the AIU or in the districts. It is efficient, a time- and money-saver for the other presenter, and I think it provides an additional level of engagement for the participants.
Among one of the ideas we gave to the group was the inclusion of a hyperlink to a "Shared Folder" within a teachers "Saved Searches" on their account, which gets embedded into a placemark on Google Earth. For more on why that can be helpful to a student and a teacher, you'll have to comment.

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