u06a1 - Attending a live webinar

Educational webinars are a resource I've been relying on for a few years now, so when I saw this unit I was excited for the assignments and to share my experiences.  Over the last few years, I have attended webinars from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), Discovery Education and webinars offered directly through my own school district.

While I personally prefer meeting and presenting in person, we know that time in the educational profession is valuable so webinars offer a number of advantages over face to face meetings/presentations.  The greatest advantage I have experienced is the ability to join the meeting from anywhere.  The county I live in (Collier County, FL) is the largest land area county east of the Mississippi.  It can take almost an 1.5 hours to drive from the southern end to the northern end of our county.  This ability to join the meeting from anywhere is very powerful.  We now can stay in our classroom, office or drive home and join the meeting.  Most webinar software has back channel features so that those involved in the meeting can send messages to the presenter, answer a question and generally stay involved in the presentation without needing to talk.  Webinars also allow many people to join the meeting and does not confine participation the way a meeting room does.  A final advantage that comes to mind is the ability to record the meeting.  Many of these webinar tools offer a recording option so that the meeting or presentation can be viewed by those who could not attend the meeting time.  

While few, there are some disadvantages to webinars as well.  Depending on the technology that the participant is using, the view of the screen can be small making it more challenging to see than on a projector screen. Presenters definitely need to be experienced at conducting webinars as these can be very different than a face to face presentation.  Attending a webinar with an inexperienced "virtual" presenter can be a downside to webinars as well.  

Webinars could easily be incorporated into the classroom.  This would be a very easy way to connect classrooms from across a county, state, country or world.  Our district provides access to the Adobe Connect webinar software.  I can connect up with any other school in the county or theoretically any school in the world who has an internet connection.  On this level and with some training, I could see both teachers and students being the "broadcasters". Our district has discussed the power of webinar / webcam technology being utilized on days when teachers are absent.  Consider two Biology teachers who are co-planning together and staying on pace with each others classrooms and then suddenly one of them is out sick for an important lesson. With webinar technology, the healthy teacher could deliver the lesson to both classrooms while the substitute teacher facilitates the learning in the sick teacher's classroom. Students would not lose that day of instruction and when the teacher returns, they could pick up the content and move ahead.  This is the type of efficiency that webinar software can bring to our schools.

Webinars offer numerous advantages at all levels of a school district and allow us to be efficient with our time, human capitol and financial resources. I will continue to attend webinars from within my own county and beyond in the future.