CEP812 - Part A - BRAINSTORM SESSION

Our group met on Monday, April 2.  Since we are all from different areas, we would not have been able to meet in person even if we had wanted to.  We chose to use the web conferencing tool called Vyew, a free program available to anyone with an internet connection.  With Vyew, you can communicate via webcam (video conferencing), microphone (audio only), or chat (text only).  You can also use a combination of the three, which is what we did.  Before we actually met using Vyew, Christine created a Google Doc to brainstorm and share ideas in order to streamline our meeting.  We all created Vyew accounts and I created a room and invited each of my classmates to the room for our meeting.  It was easy and self-explanatory to create the invitations.  Since I was not on the receiving end of an invitation, I do not know how easy it was to respond to an invitation received. 

We took some screenshots of our meeting together and I recorded segments of our meeting using Jing, as we were unable to find any way to record the meeting using Vyew itself.  With Jing, I was only able to record 5-minute segments.  Only two segments recorded successfully.  Another disadvantage to using Jing to record the session seems to be that the only voice recorded during our session was my voice since I had earphones in to reduce the feedback with the microphone.  However, since we all seemed to have feedback issues with our microphones, we relied heavily on the chat area and the room’s page to share ideas and to communicate effectively.  Most of this is evident in the video segments.  Another disadvantage I noticed using Jing to record the session is that you not only see what is happening in our web conferencing room, but also my other actions (such as adjusting the microphone levels, etc.).  I have been back to the Vyew room to look for a way to record the session.  Upon reading the help section, I determined that Vyew does not have this feature built in and it must be done with third-party software.  Suggestions made on Vyew’s website include CamStudio, Camtasia, or Screencast-O-Matic.  We will have to look into one of these in order to record our next session.

During our web conference we decided to do our project on Math Casts using Voice Thread technology.  We also decided that we would record our project using Jing.  We divided the project into different parts.  Rachel will do an overview of a Math Cast.  I will show how to set up an account using Voice Thread.  Christine will show how to create a Math Cast on Voice Thread.  And, finally, Rachel will show options for sharing the final product.  We have each been working on storyboarding our section of the project.  We will be sharing our storyboards with each other at our next meeting scheduled for Wednesday, April 11^th.  At our next meeting will determine the timeline for the remainder of the project.


Video segments of our web conferencing can be seen here:

Group 1 Group 2