Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Live session on WiZiQ

Dear Bawers,

Yesterday we had our first live session for Week 4. It was about WiZiQ and its potential as a virtual classroom and/or learning environment. The session was offered by Evelyn Izquierdo, an ESP/EAP teacher at the School of Education of Central University of Venezuela, where distance education is offered. Since her school has a very low tech infrastructure, WiZiQ has become a powerful tool for her and her students. WiZiQ is free, easy to use, simple and effective when offering online classes. WiZiq provides a virtual room with many tools, such audio, voice, text chat, video and writing; besides, classes are recorded and the content can be shared publicly if wanted. WiZiQ is also excellent for videoconferences and meetings for teachers' organizations, among many other advantages.

This session was a very exciting experience to those who visited a virtual platform for the first time, and a very nice opportunity to learn playing around with the board tools. If you didn't attend, you will find the recording of this interesting and informative session below. You will need a WiZiQ account to watch the recording.

Once you've learned on WiZiQ, we would like to know your thoughts and comments about the session and we would appreciate very much if you answer the following questions:

1. How would you use this tool with your students?

2. Would you feel comfortable moderating a session this way online? Why 'yes', why 'no'?

3. What advantages and disadvantages do you see in the use of WiZiQ? Why?

Thanks!

Visit the session page at: http://baw2010.pbworks.com/Live_session_Wiziq

Kat Urbaniak and Evelyn Izquierdo

Co-Mods Week 4

6 comments:

  1. Yesterday's session was enlightenning and fun, too. WiZiQ could be helpful to teach, assess and evaluate the four skills, which makes it a really powerful tool for EFL teachers to take advantage of. However, I missed parts of the session since I was logged out many a time. I believe this could become a major problem to overcome so that Ss can make the most of it.

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  2. I appreciated the practical aspect of this "class", the possiblity given to participants to play around with the tools.

    1. I would like to use it with students but in my country online learning of this type is not even known, let alone exploited.
    With a little prior training, I think it would be very nice to use it for conferencing and meeting purposes of ESP teachers.

    2. Only after thorough preparation and practice. Izabel and Kat were brave, experienced, tactful moderators.

    3. Advantages: user-friendliness, ability to exploit voice and video besides slides.
    Disadvantages: broad band Internet, necessity to log in/out in order to give students access to the WB.

    One last aspect: During the online session I understood that you have to pay for Wiziq (above 3 occasions). Or is is completely free??

    Thanks Evelyn and Kat for co-moderating a live session!

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  3. Dear Luján and Anisoara,
    I am so glad to know that you enjoyed the session. I did it too. I agree with you both in terms of all WiZiQ advantages. Just to clarify something, we don't have to ask students to log in or log out to give them the mic. We faced tech problems on that day, you know, Murphy's theory, ;-)); but that is normal at any virtual room, especially when there are many people uploading images or using the mic at the same time. When that happens, some rights cannot be given to some attendees because their names get stuck. The only way to get the controls back is logging off as we did today with Alado.
    I use WiZiQ a lot and tech problems like this one are not too often, but they might happen.
    Regarding the kind of account, WiZiQ offers two options, free and pro account, which is almost US$50 a year. What I mentioned about '3' what the fact that when we have a free account only three private classes (a year) can be recorded.
    My best wishes,

    Evelyn

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  4. I’d like to thank our dear co-moderators Evelyn and Kat for their efforts to demonstrate the WiZiQ Classroom. During the first Week 4 Live Session we had a good opportunity to feel like our learners might have felt in this newest environment.
    Answers:
    1.This virtual classroom allows the teacher and the learners to interact while practicing all language skills: speaking, listening, reading, writing and interaction. It can be an introduction of the topic or a final lesson, it can be used as a lecture hall for senior students.
    2.Moderating is a must, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable because it needs a high level of discipline and experience.
    3.Advantages: all in one. Brightness and newness, which is especially important for younger learners.
    Disadvantages: (inside the virtual classroom)technological problems, such as different connection speed. (Outside)The teacher has to spend more time and efforts.

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  5. Hello Evelyn and Kat.

    I couldn’t attend to the live session, but fortunately I got the chance of listening to the recording. Your explanations about how to use WiziQ were really good. I didn’t know about this tool, and I have to say, I felt identified when I saw it because it has many useful tools for teaching. With WiziQ I have the chance of showing to the students and the rest of the world what I do, it’s amazing. Besides, you do not have to think about a specific place or if it is too small or if you got too many students, I think it’s perfect. But what I liked the most of your presentation is the way you handled all the inconvenient that showed out during your presentation. How peaceful you are guys! I could see your faces and you were neutral, just trying to solve the problems. I believe that it is of paramount importance to have such a self control as you had, because in virtual classroom you have to be ready to confront all the technical problems in the most natural and tolerance way. Thumbs up!

    Regards

    Gilder

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  6. Hi,
    I couldn't attend the session but I watched the recording. I really liked it, it's a very interactive tool and that seems very attractive to students and teachers as well. It seems a little complicated to manage a session online but after training and experimenting its possibilities I would like doing so. There are many advantages because the platform offers several things: voice, video, the board. The disadvantage it has is that we can face tech problems. The session must also be very guided if students are envolved so that things go well.
    Thanks Kat and Evelyn! U R GR8!!!

    Sheila

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