My group tried out a few of the webcam software clients this evening and found that oovoo appeared to be the best in terms of both video quality and ease of set-up and use. We all liked the fact that with Tokbox you didn't need to download anything, but the video quality did not appear to be very good and one team member had technical difficulties navigating to it at first. I'd previously used Skype to conduct long-distance show-and-tell sessions between my parents or in-laws and my son (not all together, as Skype won't support three-way video conferencing - at least I didn't think so... Ehow.com disagrees!).
All-in-all I learned a great deal about some of the web-based tools that I knew were out there but hadn't had an opportunity or need to get acquainted with until now. I can see the benefits that each could have to the teacher-student interface. Much like my dealings with Google Docs earlier, these are technologies that could be beneficial in my current job but that are off-limits to me in my current work environment...
I like that you link to things and include the graph/cartoon for levity. If you thought these tools would be beneficial, is there someone who you could propse letting the site through a filter?
ReplyDeleteI actually asked our IT guy if I would be able to use any of these "cloud-based" tools at work... I think that he may have actually laughed! We pretty much follow several years behind the rest of the world when it comes to office technology. We have pretty secure systems with some pretty stringent rules aimed at protecting both the sensitive information that may be accessed from an individual's workstation and also the taxpayers' dollars (I wouldn't want to find out that the folks from my local military base are spending a large amount of their day blogging or playing solitaire - unless that was their job... wargames, perhaps!).
ReplyDelete