Web Conference: EDLD 5352 Instructional Leadership

This evening I attended a web conference for my Instructional Leadership course. The short-lived conference was a reminder that sometimes technology does not always work as planned. The conference was supposed to last for one hour and the purpose was to discuss the readings and assignments from Week 4, as well as participate in discussion with our colleagues while using web conference hardware and software. Instead, the conference was ended by our instructor after 15 minutes and nothing was accomplished. This was mainly due to the fact that some users were unfamiliar with how to use the software and hardware, which caused problems when typing and reading responses. This was compounded by the fact that there were 100 participants in the conference. I have participated successfully in a web conference in my last course and it seemed to run better when there was a smaller number of participants. I also noticed a large number of participants were unsure of how to use the web conference software. Perhaps future conferences would benefit from a 'help sheet' posted to the discussion board, much like the sheet to help post a table to a blog.