Drape's Takes

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.

• 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.

Last night's open Social Software in the Classroom session went extremely well. In fact, the stark contrast between last night's class and the class that "tanked" a week ago makes it hard to believe that the two classes are even related.

After twenty or so minutes of initial connection issues (our Ustream audio/video feed didn't work), we were able to have a wonderful discussion about social software and our students. Naturally, I used social software (the new Google Presentations) to facilitate the discussion. We finished our class reviewing some of the wiki basics we had covered in our first session, closing by discussing a few advanced wiki concepts (including wiki Templates and embedding RSS into a wiki page).

Technologically speaking, we ended up using YugmaSkype to connect teacher participants from around the world (teachers from various locations across the United States, a few from Australia, and one from Argentina). For the record, YugmaSkype was flawless (although my Skype quit out on us a few times - possibly from so many connections) and I anticipate using it again in the future.

Thanks again to all those that participated - our discussion was one of the best I've ever had in a Professional Development session. I hope to see you again next week (due up: Google Tools).

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Technorati Tags: socialsoftware07 education technology yugma skype ustream

I had an excellent informal learning "session" today with Brian C. Smith (New York), Brian Mull (Louisiana), Karen Janowski (Massachusetts), Robin Ellis (Pennsylvania), and Kelly Dumont (Utah). In an attempt to discover the best way to build upon the model for global, collaborative professional development created by Darren Kuropatwa, I have been searching for a way to:

1. Share my screen
2. Stream audio/video of my class
3. Provide a chat-room for communication between classmates regardless of geographic location

A few minutes later, I'm greeted (through tweet) by several other interested parties.


To make a long story short (we played for over an hour), we worked out what should be a pretty darn good way to create a highly collaborative global classroom environment with up to 10 different sites.

Total cost: $0.

As of right now (translation: if we don't find a better way to do things), the order of class preparation will be as follows:

1. Install Skype on client machines - I'll be doing this in our computer lab.
2. Install YugmaSkype on client machines - This is optional because Yugma installs itself when you try to use it, but installing it ahead of time will speed up the process.
3. Have all participants create Skype accounts - I'll be taking my teachers through this process at the beginning of our class. Remember, you can have up to ten people connected through Yugma and roughly that same number for Skype audio, but you can have an unlimited number of people in a Skype chat.
   
4. Add participants to your Skype list (or the Skype list of the person whose screen will be broadcast) - then when you try to initiate a Yugma shared desktop session, you can easily select participants.
   
5. Initiate a conference call (Skype audio) with up to ten distant participants - these are the participants that will be able to hear instruction clearly (through Skype). Ideally, you could have one person per site connected through Skype audio.
6. The meeting host that will share the screen then starts YugmaSkype and invites up to ten participants.
   
   At this point, up to ten people (or sites) can both hear the instructor and see the instructor's screen. We will also be doing the next step(s) to allow more than 10 sites to participate:
   
   
7. Use Ustream.tv to broadcast the video (and somewhat limited audio) of whatever else we may want to show (a screen, class, or instructor). Ustream is free, but you can only create one stream per computer. In our tests, the audio from Ustream was sub-par (choppy and had consistent lag). However, if it proves adequate, we may resort to using it entirely for audio.

At this point, I would love to hear from you. Where are the chinks in our anticipated armor? What has worked best for you? What problems will we encounter?