Another day of Jazz, and great learning happening. It’s so neat to see the progress of the participants and their new found comfort with videoconferencing and collaborative web tools. Today’s hit was definitely Flickr, with participants naming pictures and writing captions beneath them. My group in particular sure had a lot of fun with this today.
We also had a lot of fun with MysteryQuest Beaches, the professional development version of the various MysteryQuests: World Geography, MQ USA, Where in Michigan, Texas History Mystery, Fairy Tale Challenge, and LiteratureQuest. Our group chose Cleopatra’s Beach, and just before time was up to start presenting, we realized we had conflicting information on where it really was! We gave some vague clues based on our confusion, but Region 12 still got it!
Our guest speaker in the afternoon today was David MacQuart from Global Nomads Group. After explaining what GNG does, David led us in a discussion on The Future of America, in a simulated Pulse program. Participants quickly realized the incredible value of these types of discussions within the U.S. and across countries. David’s facilitation skills were a great lesson on videoconferencing as well. In the words of one participant from ESC 12:
I was impressed with David’s ability to mediate and facilitate our very diverse and passionate groups.
Finally, groups finished up the last details on their collaborative projects. Today they spent most of their group time collaboratively working in GoogleDocs. They were amazed at the reality that all 4-6 participants in two or three sites (per group) could actually edit different parts of the same document at the same time.
Tomorrow we finish up with Math Marvels, projects from NOECA, OH and CSD, MO, final group presentations, and a surprise gift from Shane, ESC 12’s talented bridge guy. As soon as we finish, I’m off to the TWICE board retreat, so this is probably it for posts this week. It’s been fun sharing Jazz with you!
Janine, thanks for the detailed summaries of each day. Today was a challenge for us with the technical issues during MQ Beaches, but it was good to show the value of back-up plans. The communications’ specialists in Skype saved the day!
I’m enjoying reading up on the Jazz class!