For my group's first "brainstorming" session, we used Vyew, a free online video conferencing program. The "meeting" went well, and overall, the group was efficient in sharing ideas, but we did have some difficulty with the sound (there was quite a bit of reverberation and echoing), so everyone opted to use the chat function (located in the lower, right-hand corner). I did find this to be a bit distracting and was constantly scrolling up to read what people were contributing, but every time I'd scroll up, the chat would drop back down because people were messaging. Thankfully, Vyew does have a nice feature that allows for the chat to be downloaded into a text file, which I ended up reading after the meeting to make sure I didn't miss anything. In the future, it'll be important to remind everyone to get headphones prior to meeting to help with the audio.
In addition to using audio and the text-chat option, we also used the document page to type down the topics each of us were taking. As a group we decided to focus on the relevant educational uses of various Google Apps and each member selected an area to research for the final project (in which we're using Google Presentation... ohh the irony!).
I would like to spend more time exploring Vyew before I introduce it into my classroom, but see its many advantages for enhancing student learning. For instance, I think it would be awesome to contact a high school abroad and read/discuss the same piece(s) of literature via web-conferencing. Also, as a side note, the district I work in uses Moodle, and I could see myself exploring the video conferencing options within that program to help simplify matters for my students.
No comments:
Post a Comment