We used Vyew as our web conferencing tool. We made this decision before we found out that recording the session was no longer a part of the free site but with the use of Jing and Screencast-o-matic we recorded a good portion of our meeting. Our meeting was held on Thursday, May 26 at 8:00 pm Michigan time. The link to our session is at https://www.msu.edu/~rebaemil/wc.flv
2. What were the advantages to using the web conferencing tool to discuss this project?
The advantages of using the web conferencing tool to discuss the project were that we could bounce ideas off of each other and come to a decision on what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it all in one session instead of having multiple emails being sent back and forth between the group members. We also had a chance (except for one member) to see what we looked like and to see facial expressions and body language instead of just text. There were a number of moments of head nodding and laughter as we fumbled with the new technology, met a small pirate daughter and heard dogs and cell phone tunes go off in the background. At the end it felt like a very productive meeting and I feel like we add knew what our rolls were. Emily recorded the session using Screencast-o-matic and I took a number of Jing screenshots.
3. What were the disadvantages to using the web conferencing tool to discuss this project?
The disadvantages of using the web conferencing tool to discuss this project made themselves apparent when we first started trying to come up with a date and time to "meet". I'm sure one of the reasons we all chose to take this class online was because of our busy and changing schedules so finding a time that would work for us all took some doing. Between these schedules, having a member on the other side of the world and the weather here in Michigan adding to the confusion made this a challenge. The next disadvantage was the program itself. While exploring the program we chose before the scheduled meeting the site looked easy to use and a couple of us logged in early to practice. As we were navigating Vyew we found that it was not as easy or intuitive as we thought. We discovered that we couldn't all have our speakers on at once or we had ear piercing feedback and one member couldn't get their webcam to work. We struggled with multiple people flipping pages, making things appear and disappear which was confusing and comical! When we worked our way through that we then saw that we couldn't record the session using Vyew. Since we were all there we decided to continue on and we used a variety of screen captures to record our session. The final and least disadvantage was the advertisements in the corner, its a small thing but I found their flashing, appearing and disappearing to be distracting.
Nicely done web conference=8-) I appreciated the extra screen shots you thoughtfully included in this post. As I was reading through the post, I began to wonder about how the group was going to create the Facebook tutorial together ~ Is Group 2 going to use Screencast-O-matic to create the Facebook tutorial? Or, are you going to create the Facebook tutorial using PPT/Google Presenter, then screencast the PPT? Looking forward to reading your the project's storyboard in the next post ~ Sue
ReplyDeletePS > The ads on some of the free resources drive me nuts, too!