Video Conferencing
Oovoo
Video conferencing and chatting has become one of the most important means of communication in various educational contexts. This technology might have started as a fun activity for people to communicate with other friends and family members, but it then grew to be used for educational purposes. In this blog, I will review how Oovoo can be used as a tool for teachers and students to communicate in a distant learning environment. One other benefits of Oovoo is that it can be installed in smartphones, tablets, as well as personal computers, and most importantly it is free although you may get a premium account.
Once you have the application installed into your device, you may video chat, text chat, or even send some files. If the internet connection is not good enough for the live video conference, you may record a video and send it directly. Another very important feature about Oovoo is that you may initiate a group video conference, unlike many other video conferencing tools like Facetime and Facebook.
In a typical educational utilization of this tool, I once used this tool to teach a non-native speaker of Arabic the language using video conferencing through Skype. I would also recommend that this tool be used as well since the teacher can video chat with more than one student at the same time. In fact, using Oovoo, the video conference can host up to thirteen people in total including the one who initiated the call. Also, during this conference the teacher may send materials or assignments for students.
Google Hangouts
With a company like Google behind Google Hangouts and with the support of YouTube, Google Hangouts is now one of the most popular options for video conferencing and video chatting. Video conferencing in Hangouts can accommodate up to ten users per group. The video conference can be recorded and uploaded directly to YouTube, which adds a brilliant feature to Hangouts. All it takes to get a Hangout account is to have a Google account; that's all. It is one of Google's free services.
Once you are logged in, you may start a video call and start inviting people to the conference. Google Hangouts is connected with your Google account, and it can import your Google contacts directly from there. Also, it is noteworthy to mention here that Google Hangouts can be installed in any device including computers, tablet, and smartphones. It can also be accessed through a web browser as an ease of access. When users receive the invitation and the call is in progress, they may join the conference directly.
One of the downsides of Google Hangouts that I noticed is that unlike Oovoo, Google Hangouts does not give the option of sending files during a video conference but the users may send photos. Another feature that I was hoping to find in Google Hangouts is the ability for people to share their screens instead of their camera feed. If I was teaching a class, I would have wanted to show my students something that was on my screen. Actually, I searched the internet about the availability of such a feature, and it turned out that there is a website called Join Me that provides such a feature. I believe that video conferencing applications that are intended for educational purposes should have this feature because from a teacher's perspective, sharing the screen is most important that the camera feed.