Video Conversation in Seesmic

I happened to check in on Alexandra Pickett in Twitter today during her presentation at Sloan-C Internation Symsposium on Emerging Technologies in Online Learning in San Francisco, California (lucky Alex!). She requested we join Seesmic to help her with her demonstation. Here's my response to her: http://seesmic.com/videos/g0numgCKFQ

Seesmic is a place on the web where you can communicate through video conversation. It’s fairly easy. You can record a video directly from Seesmic, or from your mobile phone. You can also upload an existing video straight from your computer. Use any of these methods to start a conversation.

I did finally figure out how to get the video to save, but I am not sure why I couldn't get it to upload the first four times. Also you can send your video straight to Twitter, which I did, but no reply from Alex yet. You do have to join before you can use the application but it is free.


My View for Educational Use

I see this as a wonderful tool to be able to connect personally with faculty, students or even parents at a distance, to perhaps share a new idea or to explain a difficult concept.

Collaborating Asynchronously with Voicethread

Finally got around to working a little more with Voicethread. What I like about this desktop sharing application is that, well yeah, it's free! But it allows everyone to collaborate asynchronously. For example, after I create an account, I can upload a PowerPoint presentation, add narration AND/OR make text or audio comments on the content. Then comes the best part, I invite others to participate by adding their voice or text comments to the presentation. It's worth checking out. http://voicethread.com/#home

Share & Collaborate for Free with TinyChat

Last week in my Avoiding Faculty Burnout in Online Teaching class, one of the instructors told us about this excellent website where you can just type in your name and invite people to attend your meeting. Nothing could be easier! You can invite others by email and/or Twitter or other social networks, use your webcam or not, and even embed your chat room in your blog or facebook page. Desktop sharing is included, however if you want to be able to record your sessions, you will need to pay $14.95 per month. Go to http://tinychat.com/ to try it out. I could see myself using this for just-in-time training or teaching, especially since I could embed the code right into an ANGEL page (See how in my previous post http://ldriskelthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/05/integrating-rich-media-into-angel-lms.html)
and invite students to a virtual room like this one below: