another important component that you can utilize in your course is his life sessions or their
students and this would come in handy particularly in online courses so to add an online session and
by the way this is an add-on to elearning or to Moodle here it's called bigbluebutton so what you
can do is you can add an activity called big blue button and then click on add you give it a name
for this virtual classroom it's also important to put the time that you are going to mean to the
students so that they all show up at the same time zone that you expect them to show up you
can put a welcome message here and now all users will be viewers and you as the teacher you'll be
the moderator however you can change this to make the students as moderators automatically as well
however be cautious with that because they'll be able to start the chatroom without you being there
you can also specify the times when the chat will open and it will be closed automatically but keep
track of all the dates and so on when you teach the course again now the other thing is you can
do is you can choose to record this session and you can give it a name now by the way to record it
will not recorded automatically you have to push the record button when you're ready to while you
are in the live session and then you can leave these other options alone there and just click
on save and return to the course now when it's time for you to meet with the students live and
when it's time for the students to be a part of this live web conference they'll be simply
clicking on it so we will all be simply clicking on it and then it's going to open up the software
for the live session so this is integrated it's not part of Moodle but it's an add-on that is
fairly easy to configure and by the way it's free then you choose to enable the microphone
and the student will choose the microphone or whether they want to just listen and at
this point for the sake of me recording with my microphone and using to share with this it will
not particularly work very well I'm not gonna enable it at this point now the students that
have joined the session they will show up in this list here on the left hand side and you'll
be able to click on their name here and make them presenters if need be their web cameras will show
up on this bottom right corner here by the way you can resize these blocks if you needed to or
make it fullscreen and maximize it now in this middle section here it gives you directions as
to how to use this software not suggest that you can have follow these links to these videos but
basically this is the area where you can post the document or post something like this is
your whiteboard area basically for the students you can click on next slide here if you needed
to and utilize this too right on this screen and this will be broadcast to all students including
your video and your audio now notice you can use these shapes and so on here the pencil to
write on this screen and if you have a tablet PC it might even be easier for you other things of
course you can change the colors and all kinds of other options here as well now when you go
to present in your course you need to enable the microphone from here on the left under share your
microphone and it will come up with this wizard and of course you choose to use the microphone
and then if you want to share the camera you just click on this next icon here choose share webcam
and you'd need to allow it and then it's going to give you a preview of your camera and then you'll
just click on start sharing when you're ready to do that so you need to choose allow here if
you don't choose allow it's not going to allow the camera to be broadcast to the students the
other thing here is this is the button for starting the recording for this session by
the way the recordings will not be immediately available for you or for the students usually
it's about next day that it's processed and it happens automatically behind the scenes for that
processing of the video the other thing that you can do is you can share your complete desktop and
this would require that you have Java installed on your computer most computers do and don't nowadays
because it's so vulnerable that most browsers are disabling it but it requires Java to work on your
computer you can test it from down here in the bottom so on the right-hand side you'll always
have students potentially that for one reason or another their microphone or camera is not working
this is where they can post questions and you can post responses back to the students using this
chat area here on the right-hand side so basically this tool it's incorporating chat video audio and
also presentation capabilities all into one for those of you that are teaching online there is
also another account that we have with any meeting and just check with the technology services for
getting access to using that as well as an option so that's how it'll work now to get out of this
area we simply click on log out by the way to the type in the chat area here you just type right
here and hit enter and it will post it for the students of course you can change the font if you
needed to under options to make that larger so you can see what's happening in the chat room so if I
were to type now notice everything it's larger to exit the system to close from the conference
session you'll click on exit or a logout here on the top right and that'll take you back to the
course page the nice thing about this system is that everything is integrated the students to have
another account everything is in one place now the next day when it comes time for you to post
or recording what you have to do is it because the recording will not show up automatically
you have to click on add resource or activity and you have to scroll down here and choose to
post bigbluebutton recording you click on an ad and then you'll give the name of course a more
meaningful name then you have to click on save and display and then you'll pick the recording from
here so it will actually be listed in here the next day after it's being produced and packaged so
that's how the live conferencing works it can be used for on-site classes or online classes as well