Group Leadership Project: Part A - Brainstorm & Web-Conferencing Blog Post

Our group, consisting of Amy Palmer, Liz Klein, and Elise Feichtner, decided to do our brainstorming session using the Vyew online web conferencing software (www.vyew.com). My evaluation of the software was that it was extremely effective and quite simple to use as well. My full review is after the posted screenshots and links to our Vyew conference which saved for us to go back to and add to, another great feature of the software!

The link to our conference is located here: http://vyew.com/room#/907910/Part_A_Group_Leadership__Brainstorming_Session 

Vyew does not support a recording feature, so screenshots taken of our brainstorming meeting can be seen here (Thanks to Amy for taking these!):

As should be apparent, we choose to focus of collaboration using Google Software. We all choose an  app that we will be reviewing and giving tutorials on for their usefulness in the classroom and their collaborative potential.I will be focusing on Google Sites, Googles WISYWIG html editor and publisher.

On to the questions regarding the Vyew software.

What web conferencing tool did your group use? 

We used the Vyew online conferencing software, which is a free to use (albeit ad-supported) conferencing software.  Vyew allows for chat, voice, or video web conferencing as well as white-boarding, screen-sharing, and file-posting.

What were the advantages to using the web conferencing tool to discuss this project?

This software has so many advantages for our group. One advantage was the ease of posting content like our angel rubrics and other word documents. We all needed to look at certain pages together, and this software allowed for the posting of these important documents in seconds, in a nice page display format that is simple to navigate. Another nice feature was obviously the Voice-over-IP feature that we used. All of turned our microphones on so we could talk to one another. This was a lot simpler than perhaps chatting in text would have been. This allowed for more bouncing around of ideas, which eventually led to us finding a topic that we all agreed on. The note-taking aspect of Vyew was also a nifty feature. Elise volunteered and took notes on what we were saying and deciding on. These notes could easily be saved and referenced and gone back to review later. It put our ideas in writing. The fact that the room we used is saved indefinitely on the Vyew servers is my FAVORITE feature about the program. When we go back and have our second meeting on Wednesday night, all of our stuff from the first meeting will already be there, which is a huge time saver. We never got around to using the webcam chat, the whiteboard, or the screen share features, but I could see these features being great in other settings such as directing a tutorial on new office software. Oh, and did I mention this software is free! Overall a fantastic Web 2.0 application.

What were the disadvantages to using the web conferencing tool to discuss this project? 

One main disadvantage to Vyew was the that we could not record our presentation in a video. This hampered us on this project a little bit because it was one of the suggested requirements. Screenshots though do the program justice in my opinion. We all know what we said in the session and have notes on our progress and our presentation is saved, so not having a recording feature was more of an annoyance than anything. Another thing I would like to see would be a sort of hand raising tool. Sometimes, 3 of us would start talking all at once and the awkwardness of not knowing each other would result in a lot of silent moments waiting for each other to go first. A simple cuing button would help Vyew a lot.