Broadcasting Myself

I'm a teacher, so you would think that broadcasting myself live would be no big deal. I found out, though, that with live broadcasting, you're staring at yourself as you give a talk to invisible people who may or may not be judging everything you're saying.

I decided that since this was my first live broadcast, I was going to keep it pretty casual and talk about something low-stress. I discussed different ways that teachers can make sure that they go back to the grind refreshed and ready to deal with the hours of work that none of us ever account for. I, for one, know that there are always so many activities and piles of paperwork that I never am prepared for at the beginning and throughout the school year. Making sure that we are as prepared for that as we can be is really important, I think, to our mental and spiritual health.

The first thing I had to do was make sure that my microphone and my camera on my computer were working. I used uStream, and they had an automatic check of all the features that live broadcasting used. It was really nice that this was an automatic feature. While filming, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary. I could see my two (yes, two!) people who were viewing my video. I don't know who they were and if there was a place for them to comment, I didn't see it, nor did they seem to comment. I was really okay with that.

It was also really nice that the website made it easy for me to share the link to my live broadcast. Honestly, I put it on facebook because I have more followers there, but I did not tweet it because that is mostly students who follow me on Twitter (other than the random other people who followed me back after I branched out on Twitter for a previous assignment). 

One issue that I had was the "broadcast" and "record" buttons on the uStream. While practicing, I hit both so that I would have the broadcast recorded (obviously). It worked well. When I wanted to finish the whole thing, I first stopped the recording and then stopped the broadcast. When I tried it a second time, I reversed the process, and that did not work well. It resulted in lots of spinning and waiting and the whole time I was still "recording."

Next time, I knew that I had to stop the recording before the broadcast. It made things run a lot smoother.

The whole process was pretty daunting and scary and I felt like I had to be as great as those teachers who constantly post videos of great ideas and beautiful resources to their Instagram stories. In reality, it was just me--very rough, very real, with lots of "ums" and stutters because I didn't script anything out (which I probably should have done). This was probably one of the hardest assignments I have done and I really think the majority of it being hard was that I could watch myself the entire time and not see me audience.

I'm not sure how or if I would use this in my classroom in the future. I've tried to think of ways I could use it in a secondary English setting, and I just don't see one, unless my students were watching a live broadcast of someone who could help with an assignment or idea that we were working with in class. I don't think I would have my students actually broadcast themselves because of legality concerns and the amount of parent permissions we would have to deal with. Plus, I'm not sure how that would benefit their learning in the long run.