July 7, 2011

Today we started with the news that Providence Equity Partners just purchased Blackboard.  One year ago Blackboard bought Elluminate. More startling was the announcement last night that Facebook and Skype have forged a new partnership and Skype can now be used from Facebook and there is already a YouTube explaining how it works.  Google Plus can do video chatting with 10 people which I didn't know. Camtasia was mentioned as a screen recording and video editing software but is expensive. Another video conferencing system that is expensive is Polycom PVX. Videoconferencing is the wave of the future.  2Learn is a videoconferencing system with a representative in Airdrie who can help teachers. Then we worked on Elluminate.  We saw how there is a Moderator and that students in the session can be given Moderator status. We experimented with the tools and worked on a project together. Jean demonstrated a French activity that could involve students participating on the Whiteboard. A YouTube can be shown on the whiteboard. If the computers have a webcam students can be seen. Files can be transferred to all participants. Three people can sign up and use Elluminate for free so this can be used by three people anywhere in the world to hold a conference. This is a tool that we need to be familier with and knowledge of it will improve our abilities as teachers and as students. I first used Elluminate several years ago when I took a Hebrew class online from Israel. My poor teacher had to be up about 3 in the morning to teach me in the early evening. More recently I have been involved in an online Hebrew course here in Canada where my teacher was using online "communities" where the students chose avatars and we moved around the screen while using Hebrew and doing things with our avatars and talking or reading together. In this case we used (Skype and first Second Life then we switched to Hippo). In both of these teaching situations the students were from various parts of Canada and the United States. When there are a small number of students (3)  involved you can get to know them quite well but when there are many students involved (10+) it is more difficult.  The problem with using Skype over using Elluminate is that the room has to be very quiet because the other students can hear everything going on in the background whereas with Elluminate you have a headphone on so that is not quite as much of a problem.