Week 2 Elluminate B

I worked harder to make this week's Elluminate session a little more interactive. A bit more success — it felt much less sterile as compared to the week before.

My TA Amy experimented with uploading a powerpoint of the slides in advance from a PC to see if that worked any better then last week's screen sharing. The slides worked, but the keynote to powerpoint conversion was poor so I had to go back to screen sharing by the end of the session.

The problem with Elluminate screen sharing for me is that I have two large monitors, use Keynote, and make extensive use of Mac OS X's multiple desktop "Spaces" functionality, which Elluminate just doesn't like very much. I tried a laptop but then I couldn't read the chat very well. The compromise was to print my keynote presentation to PDF, display it in the Preview, turn off tools and sidebar, turn on single page view and automatic resize to window. What that allows me to do is make the presentation window much smaller (which incidentally speeds up the screen sharing), and reposition it so I can see the chat.

I had a few too many slides, but in spite of getting dropped offline for a few minutes at the beginning of the session, I was able to get through all of them in an hour and still have the better interactivity I wanted.

This is the second Elluminate session for this course, whereas I believe all of the other courses have had only one. I know I'm rushing the students a bit, but it will make them better prepared for the intensive.