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How to engage participants

Thu, 09/24/2009 - 4:33am — xwr5009

I am trying to collect a list of ideas (that I than would like to present to our community in Switzerland) to liven-up AC-meetings with more interaction and hope that you people will add to the list I post here below:

Tips for engaging participants

Interrupt your flow of information (every 3 to 5 minutes) and

  1. Ask a question and invite the participants to use the status ‘lift your hand’ to request access to a microphone. Make sure your question is not geared to a Yes/No answer.
  2. Request participants to react with the Agree/Not Agree status to questions such as
    1. Can you hear me well?
    2. Do you see the screen with the … that I am sharing just now.
    3. Let’s see, how many of you knew this information.
    4. Do you like this information?
    5. Will this information make you change your …
    6. For who of you this information is surprising/not surprising?
  3. Use the polling pod with pre-prepared pollings to illicit quantifiable feedback.
  4. Request participants to provide information/feedback/suggestions/ questions/etc. in the chat!
  5. Use the chat or the whiteboard for a brainstorming: Collect one ‘word/short phrase’ suggestions,
  6. Create a ranking for these items by having the participants show preferences/importance/ by letting them place little stars beside the preferred item. Each one has a limited number of stars that can be placed.
  7. Encourage participants to share their screen, to show something they have created or found on the web (in that case they need to have the Add-In installed).
  8. plit the presenters task between the speaker and a moderator. The latter can than jump in to help with technical tasks, or scan the chat for questions and decide to interrupt the speaker to have him/her answer to such questions.

Also further down below in this forum a message already points to a link where some very detailed suggestions can be found:
http://www.astd.org/LC/2001/0501_hofmann.htm

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Mon, 09/28/2009 - 8:50am — John Spotts

RE: How to engage participants

Randah McKinnie with Adobe conducted a "Best Practices for Delivering Engaging Virtual Classrooms" (https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a227210/p23217391/) using Adobe Connect. It well worth taking a few minutes to take a look at this recording.

There is also a best practices User Group that meets online monthly. You can access the group to register for upcoming meetings and access recordings of prior meetings at http://www.connectusers.com/groups/bestpractices/
John

Tue, 09/29/2009 - 7:20am — Yvonne Ann Clark

Great Tips

I like your tips, xwr5009, and the reference page also has a lot of good ideas.

If you are using Adobe Connect to hold class and your students all have high-speed connections, you can designate some students to be in the "hot seat" to answer questions and contribute to discussions. By rotating the hot seat designees, you can include everyone in the class as well as keep their attention because they don't know when you will change those chosen for the hot seat or what the topic will be. This works especially well for math classes where students in the hot seat can be called on to work problems on the whiteboard -- discussions can include participants marking parts of the problem that they don't understand or places where they see mistakes.

Students can also be designated in advance to lead various discussions. If appropriate, they can prepare content to present, supplemented with uploaded PowerPoint presentations or other visuals. Presentations can include discussions using chat, emoticons, polls, and broadcast audio

Multiple choice questions can be incorporated into PowerPoint presentations. Students can indicate their answers by using the whiteboard overlay markup tools.