Experimenting with Video Conferencing

Posted on | December 15, 2005 |

Yesterday, during the final presentations for my web design class, we video conferenced a professional web designer from New Hampshire into the class. This was an interesting first step to making the world a smaller place for my students. We used webex to run the video and Skyped the audio. It worked reasonably well, but in the future, someone needs to be by the video teleconference machine to let the guest interrupt and ask questions. Our guest had a hard time breaking in. He suggested an im client to chat with someone in the room who can raise their hand for him. I also think that having a two way video conference would be helpful. We only had one camera on this one.

We also had local guests who work on web design as part of their jobs. Bringing outsiders in really created a great environment for these presentations.

I’m going to try to do this more often in classes in the future so the students have experience speaking with professionals about their work. The audience really seems to increase the quality of the presentations as the students want to show their best side.

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Category: Education, Learning

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One Response to “Experimenting with Video Conferencing”

Video Skyping with China at Learning Blog
December 5th, 2006 @ 7:19 pm

[...] About a year ago I started blogging. My third child was two weeks old and I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I started… One of my early posts was about video teleconferencing. I created the video teleconference so the president of a web site development company could observe and ask questions to my web design class during their final presentations. Last year we used a combination of Skype for audio and WebEx for video. We were successful but it was not an elegant solution. [...]