We had a good turnout to our last online session for 2011 - hurrah!

It was great to see so many people turning up. Some were new to the sessions believe it or not??%%^^$$!! Well anyway, at least they showed up and appeared to get quite a bit out of it. We started with a short ice-breaker then a report from each of them about where they were up to with their projects. (Note to myself - tricky to facilitate and and scribe onto the whiteboard at the same time. Good idea to ask Christine to take over facilitating whie I concentrate on scribing which she did like the champ she is). Most projects have got themselves under way which is pleasing. One participant who freely confessed to being terrified of technology was still hanging in there and practising - bless her. Would rather have 100 people like her in the project who are working hard to get rid of the fear factor than one person who can do it but doesn't! Most are also getting into blogging which is great. Should have some nice quotes for our report.

We moved onto polling - Ros from Japara volunteered to do the poll which she managed very well. When questioned about how it was for her she said "It seemed to be quite straightforward". Then we did a short report back from ConVerge11. I had forgotten that Janine from NRCH had also been there so thanks to Christine for reminding me to give her a turn to report on what she went to. I coud not make out what she was saying as her audio was pretty muddy but hopefully it was clearer to others. Sounds like Ian Knox was a hit with everyone! Interesting coomment from Janine when asked if she felt that ConVerge was a useful conference for her to go to. She responded that she thought it would have been better if she had known more - some of it was a bit over her head. Well, hopefully by next ConVerge - they will!

The next section was on exploring ideas for next year. I had created some slides with suggestions of tools we might like to look at as a way of letting them know what was around as most participants do not seem to have much idea beyond Facebook and Twitter. There was quite a good discussion around the tools and when asked if there was anything else they would like to explore there was dead silence so I guess that means more that they do not know what there is available to use rather than they do not wish to explore anything!

I also suggested that early in the year we have another session on facilitating in BBC as there were some new people there who had not had the benefit of our session earlier in the term. There are also some more tools in the classroom to explore such as the breakout rooms, webtours, file sharing and maybe videos.

What did I learn about facilitating this session?

• As already discussed - use another facilitator to scribe, don't try to do both
• If using the computer at work, remember to turn off my mike after speaking as it seems to give off dreadful echo - or, conversely, do it from home :)
• I could have used either Claire or Christine to watch the text chat for me and let me know when there was a question or pertinent comment. I missed all of Trish's comments because my text disappeared there for a few minutes.
  
• Try not to talk over people
• Try to persuade people to come into the room earlier before the session to set up audio. The session started at about 4.13 rather than 4 pm because of having to assist people to set up audio

Lots of things went well:

• The ice-breaker was fun
• The polling went well - talking Ros through it was successful
• Giving participants a chance to report back on their projects gave them an opportunity to have their say and helped us get to know them better
• I learned some interesting information about presentations I wasn't able to attend at ConVerge11
• An hour is a pretty good length of time for one of these sessions
• Talking about the tools got some discussion happening
• The format that we have worked out for these sessions seems to work well.

Now, over to my next BBC session in 5 minutes!