EDIM 514 Week 6_Broadcast Yourself

In this week's big assignment we were to broadcast ourselves in a live webinar that we recruited people to days in advance. This is something I do all the time within my class. I truly "flip the classroom" in the honors course I teach. Quiet often, I either prerecord myself and upload it to Edpuzzle for my students to watch, or I offer a Sunday afternoon 15-20 minute webinar week review. Believe it or not, this was started last year when student athletes who were always missing class to leave for away games started asking me to do this. It turned out so well, that I continued to do it. Each week, I send out a survey on Friday to ask how many people would attend if it was run at 7 PM. If there is less than 8 people, I don't run the session and just ask the students to email me their questions.

I was planning on doing this same thing this week to fulfill the requirements of this assignment, but things could not have gone worse this week. Monday and Tuesday of this week we had no students because we had two days of in-service. I had to take off school Wednesday from being extremely sick. Thursday, I crawled back into school to only find that we ran a practice SAT test that 80% of my students went to, so I had no one to teach. Friday, I already had planned that I was attending a conference in another state (all day was spent traveling). Saturday I thought I would be able to get some work done in the hotel at night, but there was no Wifi available in the entire hotel. Sunday comes around finally, and I am left with writing this Blog on my phone at the hotel using my mobile data.

In a result of poor planning, unexpected circumstances, and being at a conference until late Monday, I had to resort to recording myself 3D modeling a project the students stored in my room from a few months ago. I uploaded the video to YouTube and sent it to my students to work on tomorrow in class. Since the conference will be done tomorrow before their class, I have already spoke with another teacher who is going to set up a video conference through Google Hangouts with me tomorrow while I am in the airport and my students are in their class working on the tutorial.

I understand completely that this isn't exactly the same thing as hosting a webinar, but I have recorded myself, posted myself teaching online, and am doing a video conference tomorrow with the students.