TESOL Macedonia Thrace Conference - Yep, The World Is Flat
I had the opportunity to present at the TESOL Macedonia Thrace Conference (held in Northern Greece) today. Rather than fly to Greece to join the conference, I elected to give my presentation via Skype and Ustream. Other than the 30 minutes of technical difficulties that the TESOL folks had on their end, the presentation went well and was a good experience all around.
If you're interested, the Google Presentation file I used can be found here (a spin-off of the general message I've been giving lately) and the stream of my presentation (take 3, anyway) can be viewed here.
For a good time (when you have a spare minute or two), you may want to check out takes 1 and 2. Take 2, by the way, begins with a very good intro to my actual presentation.
For those of you keeping score at home, the technologies I used to get all of this running were truly amazing - and what was more amazing is the fact that everything worked flawlessly on my end. We may have turned this classroom-broadcasting thing into a science.
Each of the windows shown in the screen shots above were used at some point in the presentation. Here's a quick rundown:
- A few visual aides during the presentation were shown using the Google Docs presentation component.
- YugmaSkype was used initially to share my screen. Their limited bandwidth called for plan B.
- I had an additional iSight connected to my MacBook (which has an iSight built in). One camera was used for Skype video, the other was used for CamTwist - I then used CamTwist to feed both my desktop and my picture-in-picture webcam image to Ustream.
- In truth, Ustream is the most critical component to this entire technological equation as it allows your video to be easily recorded and also provides an easy-to-access back-channel.
