"Elluminating" my life!

My life for the past two days has been nothing but webinars. That is all my brain has been able to think about! My part in producing the eBook came really late in the game. I was on the Marketing Team and throughout the beginning stages of the creation process kept thinking to myself, "Hey I'm not doing as much as other people. I hope that I get to work on a project soon." Becareful what you wish for my friends. I was really active in telling people about our eBook and I was eager to take part in class discussions but I didn't have a very firm role until Saturday when Dr. Burton asked if I would take charge of setting up a webinar for our class.

That next day I spent a considerable amount of time on the classroom 2.0 website watching different videos on what it would take to produce and moderate a webinar. At first I thought to myself, "Hey this is super easy. No Problem." I had attended a webinar hosted by Steve Hardagon about using tech in the classroom and it hadn't seemed like too big of a deal. So I showed up to class on Monday really confident that I could pitch the idea to the class and get them all on board. In class we decided that this was going to be our final exam and a great way to launch our eBook. This is where the pressure really started to become real.

First I needed to schedule the room. Easy task? One would think. But it is a little more difficult then first meets the eye. I had a few touch a go moments, like when I scheduled the wrong room, forgot to factor in time zones, and realized there was much more to moderating than I thought. But eventually those kinks all got ironed out. To Steve Hardagon's everlasting credit he is a very patient man, proven by trying to help me understand that I didn't have my links correct. After that excitement I really started to try to nail down a good format for the webinar. I hadn't ever planned anything of this sort before. Finally I nailed down what I thought was a solid outline and posted it to my blog.

Enter Tuesday. It is the day before the event and things are starting to become a little more real. I realize that short tutorials that I have watched a few times might not be enough to get me through what I need to do the next day. So I put together a simple powerpoint with everyone's title and a little snapshot of their personal blog. Once I got all of that put together I went in at 1-2 in the morning, when I knew no one was in the "room" and practiced moderating. After a little while I started to figure out how to work the system. The program that classrooom 2.0 uses is called Elluminate and it is GREAT. I wish I had the time to explain all the wonderful features of this post but that will have to be forthcoming.

The final step was Wednesday. I got all of the elements together and felt somewhat confident of what was going on and then thought to myself, "Self, there is a lot that could go wrong here. We should try to see if Dr. Burton could meet early and make sure everything works out well." What a great idea that was. Dr. Burton and I spent about 2 hours getting a the little wrinkles fixed so that all the audio looked great and the content was ready to go.

Then came the event. At 5 the class showed up and we started to practice our twethis statements, ran over some last minute details and away we went! It went so well. I was so happy with how smoothly it ran. The flow of felt really natural and the conversation on the chat stream was really good. I was so impressed with what our class could do in such a short amount of time. Our eBook and the webinar that launched it are monuments to what collaboration can be!