Active Interactive
Video Conferencing (IVC)
Yasmine A. Salah El-Din
Abstract
The following piece of work
is a summary of a Video Conferencing workshop given by Yasmine A. Salah
El Din at the Conference for Teachers of English to Students of Other
Languages (TESOL), Baltimore 2003. The presenter gave a very meaningful
and organized presentation about her experience in conducting Interactive
Video Conferencing (IVC) sessions to reach 1000 teachers all at the same
time. Her job is to recruit teachers and train them to teach Interactive
Video Conferencing in all the 27 sites where this type of education is
taught.
Description
of the program
Salah is the coordinator for
the American American International Development (AID) office. AID runs
this program for the benefit of the Egyptian Ministry of Education teachers.
She highlighted that there are coordinators who plan everything, starting
with the training of facilitators at the beginning of the academic year,
to evaluating the teachers at the end of the school year. The target audiences
of that program are primary and prep school English language teachers,
and the goal is to develop their language as well as teaching skills.
They also take internet language and internet skills. This medium in particular
is selected because it is the cheapest. As mentioned before it reaches
about 1000 teachers all at the same time, so they do not have to bring
the teachers to the head office or to the capital to give them the training,
also because the ministry of education already has the equipment, and
it is mainly designed to provide training to Egyptian teachers of all
levels and also different subjects.
Some reasons
to implement IVC in Egypt:
- It reaches a large body
of teachers.
- Saves time and money.
- Equipment is available.
- Motivating (?) (According
to her it depends. At the beginning students are very motivated, but
later on some of them drop out the class)
- Allows exchange of ideas
between different governorates.
The structure of the program:
- Training of facilitators.
- Lesson planning.
- Assessment of teacher's
progress.
- Training of teachers.
The Training of
Teachers takes three weeks and within those weeks instructors are taught
2 hours of Methodology every day; 2 hours of Language Proficiency and
Phonology; and 1 hour of Internet Language/Skills.
Types of
interaction in an IVC
- Presenter-Participants (face
to face)
- Presenter- All 27 sites
- Presenter - Individual sites
- Individual sites- presenter
- Facilitators-Participants
- Participants-Facilitators
- Participant (s) - Participants
Some activities
to make IVC sessions interactive:
- Role-plays
- Pair and group activities
- Problem solving
- Observation sheets based
on videos
- Practicum
- E mails
- SMS messages
Few more
alternatives:
- On-line Forum
- Reflection
- Follow-up sessions
- Recap with facilitators
- Focused group discussions
- Calling on individual participants
Possible
problems of IVC:
- Power cut
- Network failure
- Large numbers of participants
involved
- Shy participants
- Uncooperative facilitators
- Mixed abilities
- Lack of motivation
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