Web-Conferencing

This week my Group Leadership Project partner, Angelica Rocha, and I participated in a web-conferencing session using the Vyew online service. Angelica initiated the session and shared the link with me so that I could join in. This initial session was focused on what our GLP would be based on. We discussed a few tools and Angelica suggested we take a look at Google Apps Scripts, a resource that could help educators using Google services automate some of the more repetitive and mundane tasks of some Google services.

This was the first time I had experienced Vyew's service, and I found it fairly easy to use and functional. The interface seemed familiar and simple. Though I couldn't find where to initiate the recording feature to be able to save our session's activities. Perhaps it was on Angelica's interface since she initiated it, but I don't think it was an easy find. That is part of the learning process though, next time we use this service, we can dig deeper and try to figure it out together. For the time being, I used ScreenFlow on my laptop to capture the activities onscreen.

The audio quality was fair, and I could hear Angelica just fine. There were some moments throughout our session where she couldn't hear me too well, but that didn't happen too much. Near the end we finally turned our webcams on and faced each other. It was nice to meet the person on the other side of the keyboard, miles away.

This experience was a great reminder of how great these tools can be in collaborating and communicating with peers, no matter where they are. In a classroom environment, I could suggest some of the teachers I support to utilize this as one of their collaborative group work activities. Vyew offered a basic yet functional platform that fit our needs. It will be interesting to see if it is a suitable platform as we progress with our project. As I mentioned earlier, the next time we take part in a session, I would like to find out more about the recording capabilities.