Brainstorm Session
My group members, Ashley Bartkowiak, Jessica Haggerty, and James Rolle all met initially through the web conferencing tool 'Vyew'. It seemed like a great tool to be able to conference and share information. However, we were met with a minor technical difficulty due to a microphone. We encountered quite a bit of feedback which interfered with communicating clearly even though we could all hear each other. We then switched to Skype which also has many great features for communicating and collaborating, such as voice chat, typed chat, screen sharing, conference calling, and file sharing. However, we were not able to record the session through Skype, but a group member recorded the session through Quicktime. While we were successful in collaborating as a group through these programs and getting a game plan set for the project, our recording is lacking the sounds which you will notice if you click the link above.
Project Idea
As a group we have decided to focus our thoughts on teaching about Google Forms and how they can be used as a valuable tool in the classroom and how they can be applied to any content area. We are going to focus on several aspects of google forms including the following; how to create a google form, what they can be used for, how to analyze the data from the results, and any advantages or disadvantages associated with using this technology.
We have divided the tasks to research each different aspect among our group members. I will be in charge of teaching the creation of a google form. We also decided that one group member will be in charge of recording the audio so our presentation has a nice flow and is easy to listen to. As we work on this project we will continue to collaborate through Skype. We are also using Google presentation to create our storyboard and Google Docs to work on our script for our final presentation. We will meet again as a group on July 30th through Skype to see where we are at with our individual tasks, storyboard, and script so that we can move on to the next phase.
Our final presentation to show the technology of Google Forms and how it is a great tool for any classroom will be presented using SlideShare.
Web-Conferencing Session
As mentioned above our group began using Vyew and later switched to Skype. Vyew seemed to have many great features to help communicate and collaborate with a group. However, because of our technical difficulty, we did not use those features or use it to carry out our conference. Based upon that I would not be able to clearly identify the major advantages or disadvantages for this program. The only disadvantage that I could note would be that not all microphones worked well as we conferenced as a group leading to feedback and difficulty communicating through voice. Upon switching to Skype, we had no issues with microphones or unwanted feedback, so it seemed to be a better fit for our task.
Skype has the advantage of being extremely user friendly. By sharing our A Skype names with one another or easily doing a search through Skype, we were quickly able to connect or call one another and begin a conference call. Through Skype, users are able to share information in numerous ways. For our group, we shared information through voice, chat, and file sharing. There is also the option to call cell phones (for a small fee), screen sharing, and to have video chat.
As I am relatively new to Skype and what it has to offer, I have not encountered any disadvantages or problems using the technology. The only issue so far has been with this task. Skype did not have a function that we could find to record our conference call, so outside software was needed in order to accomplish that task.
No comments:
Post a Comment