Webinar Night

Heading into our webinar assignment, I was a little apprehensive, mostly just because it seemed like a lot of little technological things to keep straight, and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to. However, having made it to the other side, I am pleasantly surprised with how well everything went. My group and I were able to work the Blackboard Collaborate site without much trouble, and we seemed to have got a lot of positive feedback from classmates.
First, a word on Blackboard Collaborate. At first glance (from watching an old webinar), it seemed kind of complicated, and seemed like there was a lot to keep track of. But, with minimal run-through time, our webinar went off without many complications. The controls for the site are pretty intuitive and straight-forward, and any time we had an issue it was pretty easy to figure out. For example, we wondered how to mute everyone else's microphones in our room without going through and manually disabling each permission. Turns out, there's a button for that. Our only issue came with turning the mic on and off, which we overlooked at the beginning of the webinar. Additionally, I hit "stop recording" at the end of our session, but did not turn the mic back off, so the listeners still in the room heard us chatting for a minute or two before we realized what was happening. (My bad, guys!) Overall, I'd consider working with the Blackboard platform again, because it was pretty easy to use and can be shared easily with others.
The tool we presented on was Google Classroom. I won't go too in-depth about it here, in part because I've already talked about it a fair amount in the last week. Basically, it is easily customizable and be as much or as little as you need it to be. I think this was a good tool to share with our classmates, because it can be used across all disciplines in a number of different ways. I'd also like to think that the high turnout for our webinar was because this is such a great tool, but I also realize we had a fairly convenient time slot... This presentation was valuable for me as well becuase it allowed me more time to play around with Google Classroom and gain familiarity with the site, which I can definitely see myself using in the future. I'm not sure what the tech situation in my future job(s) will be like, so I can't speak to in-class use right now, but I think the site is really great for organization outside of class time.
On one last note, I wanted to say how much fun I had with this project. Part of that was just because I was working with two clowns, but being in the Brandon Center with everyone prepping and listening to each others' webinars was a really nice experience. It was fun to see what everyone else had come up with, and having everyone together working on the same thing was a great vibe. Yay dolphilians!