Reflection SIX

Reflection Six - Wimba discussion
The idea of Wimba discussion is wonderful. The group members use this opportunity to discuss the course content and support each other online. I enjoyed the communication tool and it worked well for me.


What obstacles did I face?
Unfortunately there were many obstacles for using the Wimba discussion tool:
1) A lack of time to get together - each group member has a busy working schedule and we had to be very committed to get online together and have a productive discussion.
2) Different levels of computing skills - this challenged me the most. Due to differences, we often had to wait for 1 or 2 group members to get online, and then by the time they were online successfully, it was time to finish. We also spent quite a lot of time at the beginning showing them how to use the headset and open the discussion.
3) A lack of resources - in our school, we don’t have enough headsets, and there weren’t any available when we needed to borrow them. We therefore just typed on the discussion board instead.
I am not complaining about the tool, which was great. Rather, I am just sharing the difficulties I had at times working with other people. It may have just been my personal challenge.

What to do in the future?
I would suggest that we could either choose to have our discussion on the Wimba discussion board or face-to-face discussion. We could meet at lunch time, discuss the course content and catch up for lunch. This is also an opportunity for the group members to support each other. I do understand that we need to follow the trend of ICT technologies as part of our teaching and learning tools, and I like them too. However, we can’t afford to spend so much time struggling with the different levels of computing skills.