White-Boardom, a Litmus Test for Virtual Classrooms – Part 2

Trainers can be wonderfully inventive when it comes to designing activities, but awfully inhibited when it comes to transferring them online

In yesterday’s posting to share a number of whiteboards with you. Those I created for a variety of different teaching and training strategies. Today I shall continue the theme with some other examples. In subsequent postings I’ll take each of the 5 strategies I mooted yesterday, and I’ll show examples of interactions for each. Today I’ll dwell for just a little while longer on “engagement”.

I’d like to make the point that one should not be constrained to do everything within the glass window that is the computer screen. This is true whether we are working live online or through packaged tutorials. I almost always suggest at the start that participants bring along some paper and a pen or pencil. I run face-to-face and online courses which are supported by comprehensive notes and handouts. Nevertheless many learners prefer to write their own contemporaneous notes as it helps them to internalise and embed what they are learning. I always encourage this, and allow time for it to happen. Often, at the end of a busy three-day course, I will encourage participants to express all they have learned and their plans to implement it in no more than 50 words; then I ask them to reduce it to 20 words. It is a contrived exercise, I accept, but it does focus the mind on the absolute key learning points. Another cheap trick is to ask a group at the end of a session each to write a letter to themselves along the lines of, “You remember those days we spent together and all your good intentions on the day; well how have you been getting on? Have you managed to …? Did you …?”

Of course you can do all of this online; all virtual classrooms have some facility to type text. When you use them in combination with asynchronous tools, you can anchor the participant’s learning and build in support from self, peers and trainer, using words from plans, goals and affirmations that have been generated within the virtual classroom session.

In all circumstances, handwriting is good because it is essentially personal. Type is good in that you can harvest words from it by copying and pasting through your computer’s clipboard. Adobe Connect and Elluminate for example will accommodate this. You can ignore duplicates and pick out the best ideas from a stream of text to reconfigure into a consolidated document.  That document may be held within the whiteboard itself or it may be shared as a desktop-share or application-share.  WebEx has a dedicated notes panel, but it does not allow other participants to view or add to it. It is still a very useful facility since it is kept apart from the instant message/chat facility which acts as a running commentary of cross-fired thoughts, that which is generally referred to as the “back channel.” Elluminate has a very elegant widget that lets you open one or more text panels in a whiteboard and then type or paste words into it.

You can position and scale the panels so that they conform to good practice for screen layout.

If text fills the box then scroll bars appear and I’ve not yet been able to exceed the limit for number of words.

This serves very well for group work where each group has its own screen area just as it might have its own flipchart in a classroom, and you can copy and paste across from one to another. This may save time and give the rainer more control than using breakout rooms – another facility that I’ll comment on later.

Returning to the idea of hand-written text; in the first posting in this series I mentioned the “how to say hello in other languages” exercise. I showed you a couple of different scripts for trainers. I also suggested that the way you present it and the interaction you require from your audience may be affected by the tool you’re using. I stated that there is always a workaround. Good old pen and paper often provides the answer. Taking the same exercise as yesterday, here is an alternative low-tech approach to it while still working live online.

Trainer says:

How would you like a little challenge to get you warmed up and put your brains in gear? You’ll need to write your answers on paper. I’m going to name 15 countries quite quickly, and I’ll show you their flags. So get ready now – write the numbers 1 to 15 on your paper. When you’ve done that, raise your hand so I can see who’s ready.

All hands are raised (if some hands are not raised the trainer acknowledges it and the co-presenter as host deals with any obstacles in the background).

Trainer says:

Just to make certain everybody knows what to do, let’s do the first one together. Here’s the flag of Germany. We need to write on our lists the word for hello in German. I’ll show you the other 14 flags, name the country and you make your list to show how to greet them with “hello” in their own language. Does anyone know it – raise a hand or type it into “chat” if you do. (Give a well done if anyone has the answer) The word is wellkomm , and you can write that next to number 1 just as I’m doing here on my  screen, only you do it on your paper. Well now we know everybody gets at least one mark in this test! But from here you are on your own.

…and so on. Now for an adult audience you may feel that the script is pedantic or patronising and offers too much help. It’s really a judgement call; in my experience things that seem to the trainer to take a long time may actually pass very quickly for the learner who is not yet used to taking instructions online in this way. Put it another way, my golden rule is that there is no such thing as “obvious”. When instructional designers worth their salt design activities in tutorial-based e-learning, they always make sure the rubric is clear. The same discipline should apply to the design of synchronous online learning.

No matter what types of interaction you plan to use, it is very important to get everybody actively engaged before you move on, and you must leave them feeling confident about how to interact with you during the lesson ahead.

You may be interested to know that I use the font Bradley Hand ITC or Kristen ITC to achieve the hand-written effect in whiteboards. In the example shown, I’m working in Elluminate which lets me create my overlay text as an object in PowerPoint. I start with a background image made in PowerPoint and then loaded into the whiteboard.

Then I create simple text boxes which I tilt in PowerPoint to fit the perspective in the whiteboard image.

Then I scale it and paste it into the whiteboard.

All of this fiddly work can be done in advance and so when I say I have built a library of whiteboards, they are not all flat images, but rather compilations of objects. This is the end result. I can reuse images like this by simply replacing the text with anything I like from a store of prepared items or I can build them “on the fly”.

My preferred tool for this is Elluminate for its versatility in letting me place, hide, reveal and reposition objects dynamically live online. I can also pass control so members of my audience can do the same. Using this simple technique it is possible to personalise images very quickly and to good effect. The t-shirt image below is one that I plundered from my friend Barry’s presentation. Using a black box as a mask I can replace the text with an infinite number of messages or I can use it as a creative exercise as below.

Script for t-shirt exercise

Display t-shirt whiteboard with specimen text on view. Trainer says: “t-shirts can carry all kind of messages. Here’s one” Remove the text, leaving a blank text box on the t-shirt front. Trainer says: “Let’s think up a slogan of our own to convey the message we need to get across today. You must come up with as few words as possible to get your message across. You’ll work in groups of 4 in breakout rooms. Use your whiteboard and text chat to try out ideas. You have 5 minutes to come up with your slogan. I’ll warn you when there is a minute left and I’ll call you back into the main room to share ideas and vote for the one you like best.

I’d be using the exercise to reinforce whatever the topic of the virtual classroom happens to be for example “do you need that light on?” or “loose lips sink ships” or “smile before you dial” or whatever else is appropriate to the content of the lesson. I’m not holding up this exercise as a paragon of novelty and creativity. It is the sort of thing that happens in real classrooms day by day. However I am certain that many trainers feel inhibited about trying the same sort of thing live online. Please have courage – the truth is that with a little practice you can do this sort of thing more effectively than face-to-face, you can preserve the process as well as the result by recording it and you do not waste time or shoe leather pounding along corridors looking for syndicate groups that failed to return on time.

Sharing

Next week, in part 3 of this series I’ll move on from engagement to the concept of sharing as I defined it yesterday. I’ll illustrate the points with images and scripting from a variety of interactive exercises I’ve tried and tested in various virtual classroom systems.

About Phil Green

Phil Green has written 71 post in this blog.

Phil identifies himself as a perfomance consultant and teacher who helps people and organisations to do the best they can at work. He has strong skills in designing learning materials and workflow support, and draws from a wide spectrum of methods and technology. Co-designer of a certificated qualification in blended learning, he has trained hundreds of others from many industry sectors in how to create effective learning solutions, both online and offline.

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Related posts:

1. White-Boardom, a Litmus Test for Virtual Classrooms
2. Web meetings, webinars and virtual classrooms compared
3. White Boardom Part 3 – some new examples
4. White Boardom Part 9 – Yet More Management and Strategy meetings.
5. White Boardom Part 7 – Management and Strategy meetings.