A couple of weeks ago, I completed my first live Blackboard classroom facilitation. This is where you present your class lecture live to your class full of students. I completed this assignment with another classmate, which was nice since I was a little nervous of how my voice would sound to others. Facilitating consists of the synchronous lecture and the asynchronous discussion posts.
To prepare for the synchronous section of the facilitation the first thing I suggested we do was complete a sound check. This turned out to be most challenging and frustrating step of all!! On my end, my computer passed the Blackboard sound and mic check, but unfortunately my partner could not only not hear anything I said, but when she did hear something it was garbled. We spent many hours and frustrating moments trying to solve our sound problem, but it remained an issue. I notified my instructor of the issue and she suggested since we did have sound in the sandbox, we could conduct our live session from there. My partner and I agreed thinking our sound issue was finally solved and that she would use the conference line to complete her part of the lecture. The night of our facilitation, I began my part of the lecture. Everything was going smoothly, until my partner discovered that the phone conference line was down-so she couldn't complete her lecture! When we discovered that the conference line was not working correctly, we paused the class in order to troubleshoot, but nothing was working. I didn't want to lose the interest of my classmates so I decided to complete the rest of the lecture. My partner handled the chat room, and after a rough beginning my first facilitation ended smoothly!
For the asynchronous section, our week had two discussion posts, My partner took one discussion and I the other. I enjoyed reading and reacting to everyone's posts. I quickly noticed how discussions can get quite lengthy very quickly. So, in the future I would like to respond earlier to my student's posts to generate a meaningful conversation and to encourage consistent participation.
In closing, overall the facilitation went well. I enjoyed presenting to my class and receiving feedback on my performance. I really liked the flexibility of responding during the asynchronous section of the course. I started out nervous about the entire facilitation, but in the end it suits my personality and schedule. I look forward to more facilitation experience in the coming months, in the mean time I will be "facilitating ahead.".
