Local Delivery Model - Progress being made

Nothing like a two week break to bring a fresh look on things.

My last post suggested that the selection of students meant that the technology wasn't being used as it was last year and bandwidth issues were causing problems.

I guess when things don't work you adapt. During the holidays students have requested help online. This has resulted in a new "tool-set" being adopted.

Initially the students were using my school email for contact. This turned out to be problematic, due to space restrictions etc. Purely by accident we fell into using g-mail accounts and we have found that the default layout really promotes a discussion thread. Really useful when you are reinforcing a concept and having a student work through something. This has received a big tick.

I do need to encourage the use of forums again however. Email has worked fine in this case, however a forum in general is a much better tool.

For more immediate conversations we have taken to using Windows Live Messenger (Transcripts kept for historical reference - safer than a phone call really). Using this and screen captures has gotten around the issues of not having the use of Centra.
The only issue with this tool is that you need to be careful not to be "too available". I am sure people will understand what I mean here.

Although not used as the students are beyond the analysis/design stage, earlier in the piece I made use of an online collaborative space - thinkature. This was not used with students, however, I could see this easily being adopted and fitting the model.

So in situations of low bandwidth it is still possible to local deliver. One simply needs to adabt to the environment in which they are working.