Web Conferencing

Today I held my first ever web conference with my group from MSU. We decided to use Vyew, a free online web conferencing tool. There were a few other options including, Adobe Connect, which offers a 30-day free trial; Yugma, which only allows you to invite 2 other people; and WebHuddle, which wasn't as pretty as Vyew and didn't have as many features. However, if you'd like to record your session, I'd suggest going with WebHuddle as Vyew's recording software is still in its alpha phase and doesn't record audio. Instead of recording a silent session, I recorded 15 minutes of the session using screen-o-matic, but it was only 15 minutes. Nevertheless, I still found Vyew's interface more intuitive and user-friendly. I loved all the tools you could use to draw and highlight.

Aside from the recording problem, Vyew was great! We were able to upload pictures and documents; share our screens; type, highlight, and draw on the board; and use webcams to communicate. In a lot of ways it was more efficient because we had so many tools to work with, and everyone was able to show documents or their screen if they wanted to demonstrate something. Another great feature was that you could have multiple pages so that if you wanted a clean slate, you didn't have to erase it, you just went to a new page. We could then flip back to a previous page if we wanted to remember the notes that we had made.

That said, we did have some technical difficulties. One of the group members never got her webcam working. Another was unable to turn his microphone off resulting in terrible feedback if more than two people had their mics on. Although annoying, this was actually beneficial because it made me think about what I said and decide whether it was necessary before I said it. Finally, the screen sharing was only partially successful in that only one person was able to see the other's screen. I think these are small problems, however, and if we did this again, we would most likely have worked out most of the glitches.

I'm not sure I would use this tool in my classroom. We see our students and they see each other everyday. There is rarely a need for out of class communication, and it would be nearly impossible for the students to find a time they could all meet. If our classes had less time together, this would be a great way for speaking classes to get extra practice. They could practice speaking, record the session and give it to the teacher for marking or just to prove that they did it. The extra tools such as typing and showing pictures could be used to better demonstrate ideas or for students to teach each other.

Furthermore, I think this would be great for communication between our branch in Korea and the University of California Riverside in the States. It's often difficult to communicate with them due to time differences and lack of easy communication. They've mentioned several times that they'd like to work with us on professional development, but all of their webinars are scheduled for them and nearly impossible for us to attend. However, with this tool, we could invite them to our webinars (at a more convenient time for everyone) and work on bridging the gap between the two campuses. In addition, we could record our sessions to show them what we're working on and maybe get feedback or ideas for them.