Attend a Live Webinar (u06a1)

Attending a Webinar this week was a new experience for me. I’ve had to log in on WizIQ for other Wilkes grad courses, but I’ve never had to locate a Webinar to attend on my own. With my schedule this summer and the way this course is laid out, I typically work on a Wednesday – Sunday schedule. When I started searching for Webinars this week, I realized that most of the listed sites hosted their Webinars on Monday or Tuesday. This was a little bit of a hurdle since I had already passed those days. The other thing I realized was that many of these only hosted during the school year or once a month. So I set off onto Google and found a Webinar hosted by Presence Learning entitled: Online Speech Therapy: Hot Questions, Cool Answers. The archived version of this webinar can be found here.

I appreciated attending this type of Webinar because there were slides (that were accessible at a later date) and commentary. There was also a q&a forum as well as an open chat for participants to dialogue with one another and ask questions of the presenters. As someone who doesn’t always like to speak up in group settings that I’m not familiar with, this made attending the Webinar more comfortable. When thinking about future Webinars, I would definitely be more likely to attend one in this format as opposed to the Google Hangout or live video streaming ones. One of the weaknesses was the site that was hosting the Webinar. WebEx has a nice platform, but I had a hard time figuring out if there were any other participants attending, and the default settings for the q&a/chat forums were not made so that you could interact with your fellow participants very well. It was also hard to do too much exploring because the session was only active when it was time for the Webinar so I couldn’t get acquainted with it very easily.

I think there are uses for Webinars in the educational setting, but I see it mainly with distance learning, blended learning, or in a secondary or post-high school setting. I really believe that my 2^nd graders still need the in-person, face-to-face interaction. If I were going to encourage Webinars to be used in my school, it would be through faculty in-services. I think there are MANY free valuable Webinars out there that we could benefit greatly from as a staff.