Our once-a-month online teachers’ chat has continued successfully
this year, with a meeting in every month except July and December. All
members with email addresses are notified a few days in advance of this
upcoming event each month. Although we start each session with a pre-set
topic, other questions and comments often develop. New members often have
questions that more experienced members can help them with, and this I feel
is one of the main benefits of this monthly exchange. We generally average
about 10-15 people attending each chat, held in the BBO chat room facility.
It is great to have the support of the few regular experienced teachers who
do attend, I really appreciate their input. In particular this year, I’d
like to thank Leslie Shafer who stepped in at the last minute to become the
‘expert’ on the business side of teaching when our pre-set topic presenter
opted out. I would urge other board members to attend this chat when they
can, to encourage our newbies. It only takes one hour of your time once a
month. Frankly, I’m a little disappointed with the lack of support from the
board, except for those few who do attend regularly and you know who you
are. The chat record is retrieved and saved, and can be emailed to anyone
who asks for it. I have these records now going back seven years.
Our monthly on-line Chat sessions are informal, friendly and fun. They
enable us to network with other teachers, comparing notes, ideas,
frustrations and successes. For those who have not yet tried this form of
communication, here’s how it works.
To take part you need to download the Bridge Base program from:
www.bridgebase.com
[If you have any problems with the download please contact Fred Gitelman on
1-888-631-9581, between 8 am. – 5 pm. pacific time, he has graciously
offered to walk you through the download by phone.]
Once you have this program on your computer you can go into the BBO site any
time that you are connected to the internet, by clicking on the icon on your
desktop. You can play bridge on line for free, organize on-line lessons with
students, or playing time with students, or visit the bridge library.
To access a chat room on BBO you simply click on the ‘explore bridge’ button
from the main screen, then click on ‘chat rooms’. Anyone can open a chat
room for bridge purposes. Our ABTA chats are usually scheduled for the
fourth Sunday of the month, at 8.30 pm. EST. For a list of our up coming
Chat topics and dates see the ABTA web site at www.abtahome.com or look in
your latest Quarterly magazine. Of course, we conduct our ‘chat’ by typing
to each other, so if you are a fast typist you do have an advantage. Once
in the chat room you will see only a big empty screen with your name and a
few others listed at the side. To ‘chat’ you simply start typing, a chat
bar will appear with your message in it, and at the end of your sentence you
hit enter to send it to the rest of the room. As people ‘talk’ the screen
fills up and you can scroll back up to read if you missed something. It’s
like reading the script of a play. You can also drag the chat bar up to the
top of the screen so that you can more easily read the new messages
appearing at the bottom. To find out who else is in the chat room with you
just move your cursor over their name at the side and their profile will
appear. It is helpful if those of you who take part fill in your profile
ahead of time so that we know whom we are chatting to. I will often ask new
members to identify themselves to the group, you only need to type in ‘hi, I
’m --- from --- ‘ and if you don’t want to take part further you can just
read what everyone else has to say. But we do encourage everyone to take
part in the discussion.
All our Chat sessions are recorded and saved as Word documents. If anyone
misses a Chat that they really wanted to attend I can send the record as an
email attachment.
If you need any more information about how to take part, please email me at:
msparrow@csolve.net
Hope to see you at our next session!
Maggie Sparrow
Barrie, ON, Canada
|
