In one of last week’s blog posts we highlighted EduTech’s Smackdown Open Mic Night with Dr. Joyce Valenza, which took place Monday (December 3rd) at 7:00 PM. Though there were maybe other places I would’ve rather been at 7:00 PM on a Monday :), I have to say I turned out to be very glad to have attended this online (Blackboard Collaborate) event. It was a great experience all around! The “open mic” approach was really quite fun, quick, and refreshing. Attendees that wanted to share a resource with the virtual audience had been asked in advance to create a slide and embed it in the larger slideshow so that they’d have a “spot” in the line-up of presenters. As the night progressed, one-by-one each slide appeared on the screen and the mic was turned over to the presenter.

The host of the evening was Dr. Joyce Valenza, along with a few other (big name) moderators. Throughout the hour-long open mic webinar scads of helpful tools, apps, and other resources were shared. I literally have four notebook pages full of tools/resources with helpful ideas and suggestions for how to effectively utilize them. I anticipate that I may be sharing some of these resources/tools/apps in upcoming blog posts, but know that they ranged from holocaust survivor story websites, to apps like Reflection, to storytelling sites/apps, to poster making resources. Really, the whole gamut was covered here! It was an energizing experience, and I definitely plan to attend similar events in the future.

Lucky for you if you missed it… There is an archived version of the webinar now available! If you participated as well, we definitely want to hear from you! Please share (in the comments area) the ideas and resources you found the most useful!