Using Social Media in Religious Education by Will Kahn-Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at bluesock.org.
This workshop was written by Will Kahn-Greene and run for the first time at RE Week at Ferry Beach July 11th through July 16 in 2010.
This workshop is contained in a single guide–there’s no separate guide for workshop leaders and a separate guide for participants.
Instead, reading materials, resources, and other things like that are throughout the guide as urls and footnotes.
Send any feedback, comments, additional material, changes and all that stuff to:
willg [at] bluesock dot org.
Feedback will be factored into these workshop materials.
Many many thanks to Dan Harper for giving me this opportunity, Shelby Meyerhoff for her thoughts and help, and Sadie Kahn-Greene for her thoughts, help and patience.
Thank you to Cindy, Lynn, Karen, Mary, and Louise who took the workshop at RE week for their patience, thoughts, and excitement which helped me flesh this material out. Thank you to Eddie and Alice who sat in, too.
Thank you all so much!
The workshop materials were written using Emacs [1] and Sphinx [2].
| [1] | http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ |
| [2] | http://sphinx.pocoo.org/ |
If you don’t specify experience requirements for the workshop in the description text (e.g. “This workshop is for beginners.”), then you’ll probably end up with a broad spectrum of experience levels.
This workshop isn’t structured well enough to handle that effectively: either the beginners will be lost or the experienced people will be bored. That’d be great to fix some day.
Instead, I recommend you run the workshop for a group that’s all around the same level.
I think there are two ways you can run this workshop.
No network or unreliable network
If you have no Internet connection available OR the Internet connection isn’t reliable, then you’ll have to go the no network route.
Great network
If you have a great Internet connection, then you can run the workshop with the activities and demos and everything will be super duper.
Before you run the workshop, you need to go to the location and make sure the Internet connection works and that it’s “fast enough” for demos and activities. One way to do this is:
It’ll tell you latency times, upload and download bandwidth. If the tests fail, that’s a sure sign the network connection isn’t good enough and demos and activities will be difficult. If the latency time is really high (> 500 ms), then you might have difficulties–try running some demos and see how it works.
I had an intro day and a closing day, then three days of workshop and one day when Shelby came down and did the social media presentation she does for the UUA. So I organized the workshop this way:
| Intro | introductions, covenant, course outline |
| Shelby | social media presentations |
| Day 1 | communication tools |
| Day 2 | collaboration tools |
| Day 3 | coordination tools; accessibility |
| Closing | evaluating social media, control, dependency handling changes and wrap-up |
I had the great idea of encouraging people to build slide-decks of the Present material using different online tools. It’s a terrible idea and not worth the trouble.
You can use Google Docs, but your presentations will look a bit drab.
You could use PowerPoint or KeyNote and you’ll get a better presentation.
I used Google Docs the first day, then used 280slides.com, and then decided it wasn’t worth it and used the tried and true s5 [3] system.
| [3] | http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ |
You have to have a projector or large monitor. A lot of these sites have small text–it should be possible to read that from the back of the room.
You could do it all online, but doing the demos with a single big screen is probably the best option.
Version 0.6: July 20th, 2010
Version 0.5: July 11th, 2010
Wrote the workshop materials.