Have you ever had your collaborative videoconference projects take on a life of their own? Recently several projects that I’ve been involved in have spiraled (out of control?) to create even more events for students. Here are a few examples:
Monster Match. Roxanne Glaser was kind enough to use us to fill a few “leftover” spots she had in her local project, Monster Match. On October 11, she needed 3 classes from me. By the end of the next day, I had 25 classes participating!!! As Roxanne, says, the project “blew up” in my service area! Most of my schools are connecting point-to-point, and many of them are connecting locally.- Extending Monster Match. In addition, I’ve heard from a few teachers that they are planning future connections with their partners from Monster Match. One building partnership has expanded to grade levels that weren’t participating in Monster Match.
- Canada partnership. A few weeks ago, someone who had attended one of my VC presentations emailed wanting to do a collaborative project. I think they were originally thinking just one event. Little did they know! I forwarded the note to one of my enthusiastic building coordinators, and now they have nine connections planned!
It’s exciting to see hours of training and professional development pay off. It’s exciting to see teachers realize from a model project (such as Monster Match) all the other curriculum activities they could do with their partner class. And voila! Here they are creating simple curriculum learning experiences to benefit their kids. My new model of “letting go” and training my buildings to be independent is resulting in ever more increasing use of curriculum videoconferencing.
About Janine Lim
Janine Lim, PhD, currently serves as associate dean for online higher education in the School of Distance Education at Andrews University, in Berrien Springs, MI. She and her team support over 200 online courses, provide training for faculty teaching online, and work with the campus infrastructure support of online learning. Her department also provides educational technology and Moodle support for faculty and students. In addition, Janine is responsible for the faculty and courses of the Consortium of Adventist Colleges and Universities. Janine has taught over 15 unique graduate educational technology classes online numerous times over the past 15 years, with some classes attracting participants from all over the world. Her undergraduate teaching includes social media courses for communication and digital media majors. Janine has served on the board of the United States Distance Learning Association since April 2015.
Prior to her work at Andrews University, Janine coordinated distance education for 22 K12 school districts in southwest Michigan for 14 years. In that position, as one of the co-founders of TWICE, Michigan’s K12 Videoconferencing Organization, Janine has spearheaded popular international K12 videoconference projects such as Read Around the Planet and MysteryQuest. While still serving on the board of TWICE, she was instrumental in designing and implementing the CAPspace website for collaborative videoconference projects. Janine also served on a team of Michigan educational technology trainers providing a workshop called ATA Technology Academy.
Her current online learning research interests include successful teacher behaviors, quality online discussions, and student activity patterns in self-paced courses.
Videoconferencing Out on a Lim 
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