I just spent the last two hours on an incredibly cool online tool called Marratech. It is a synchronous online way to teach a class. My buddy Kate at University of New Orleans, who bought my soul hired me to teach a class for her students this semester, was giving me a tutorial on how to make this baby work.
YEEHAW!!
It was awesome! Here comes the geek in me…we had both our pictures up on the screen and were listening via headsets and talking via microphones. Then there was a whiteboard feature on the left side of the screen (Like a SMARTBoard for you other teachers out there)…and I could literally bring anything I wanted onto the whiteboard and then work with it….
So, my 4 year old nephew’s picture was the first thing to go up…when he was under one and it was the cutest little naked baby picture…oh, what we did to him his picture in the name of education! Poor baby had a tail, horns, arrows pointing to his various maleness features…thankfully, I also learned how to make it all disappear as well!
Then we did a number on my first Powerpoint session….oh.my.goodness. Kind of fun what you can do the anatomical features of the ear….*smirk*
Then we discovered the recording feature….can you say…STAND UP COMIC? We recorded and viewed and listened and rerecorded…and I basically had WAAAAAAY too much fun learning how to use this course tool.
It was very much like the Twilight Zone…going somewhere I had never gone before…OH, wait…that’s STAR TREK!
At any rate…it was a blast…I learned how I would be teaching my 11 students beginning next Thursday…and it seems my first day back this semester went glowingly well. WOOT!
93 days to Specs and Cabanaland
