Sometimes you might want to talk or work with people remotely,
or have a guest speaker talk and interact with your class without physically
being there in the room - the links below will take you to services that let
you do this:
Voxli - Best used when you need to voice chat with a group of people whilst working collaboratively using another web application.
If you need to work collaboratively with a group of people using a site like Google Docs, it sometimes helpful to be able to talk with them whilst you do it. Voxli lets you create a voice chat room for you and up to 200 other people to communicate in. It's free and easy to set up, each chat room has it's own web address which you just end to people if you want them to join.
Procaster - Best used when you need to run "live" computer training to many people who can't actually be in the same room as you
Procaster is a piece of software that you download and install onto your computer. It then lets you broadcast a live video stream of you webcam, or any piece of software that's running on your computer coupled with audio from a mic that you may have plugged in. Viewers can then watch the video stream on a normal web page and are even given a chat room to ask you questions in.
Whilst voice chat is not provided, if you run this alongside Voxli or Oovoo/Skype you have a very powerful remote training and support system.
This means you can easily run 'live' training sessions with people if you want to, and when you aren't running a live broadcast, you can configure the viewer to show previous training sessions or videos from sites like YouTube - it's brilliant and I urge you to try it!
DimDim Web Meetings - Best used for 'many to many' conferences
"With no software to download or install, Dimdim forever democratizes
web - based live meetings. In seconds - right from your browser - you
easily host or attend web meetings complete with audio and video
conferencing, screen and application sharing. After experiencing the
freedom and ease of Dimdim Web Meetings, you’ll wonder why you ever
used expensive and difficult alternatives"
Oovoo - Best used for desktop video conferencing
Oovoo is a brilliant piece of free software that lets you have a video conferencing with up to 5 other people. It also lets you record the conference and save it as a video file for later playback. You must try this!
Skype - Best used tor 1 to many conferences
Skype is a free application that you can download and install onto your computer and some types of phone - it lets you hold free conference calls and 1-2-1 video calls along with sharing files and an instant messaging chat system.
Using Skype you can easily display a guest speaker to a class via a large monitor or projector and then have the group/class ask them questions. Depending on the class & available facilities you may want to have a "middle man" that puts the questions to the guest speaker either via microphone or text based chat.
If you want to record a Skype conference as an MP3 for later listening you can do that by using either MP3 my MP3* or Skype Call Recorder you can learn more about each of them by clicking on the links above.
In addition, if your guest speaker does not have access to a computer, they can still talk to you and your students using Skype via Ring 2 Skype - which lets you set up a local rate phone number that people can dial using a normal telephone and then talk to you and your students in the classroom/lecture theatre your computer via Skype.
Watch the video below to learn more:
* Thanks to Alex Baily & his blog for pointing out how MP3 my MP3 can be used to record Skype conversations - you can read the original post here.
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