Group Leadership Project: Part A

For our group leadership project, our group, the middle school teachers, met on Thursday using Vyew. Stacy recorded our meeting using Camtasia. I must say, this was the most frustrating online experience I have had during my CEP courses yet. During the beginning of our meeting, we all talked by typing in the chat and everything was fine. As soon as we went to the webcams, it was a mess. One person was able to talk, but couldn't get the webcam to work. Another person kept being kicked out and had to sign in over and over again. I was only able to hear people from time to time and often caught the very end of what they said. I felt like I couldn't do my part to contribute because I never knew what anybody said. Also, when I clicked the 'talk' button, nothing happened, so I was never able to speak. Fortunately, I was still able to utilize the chat room feature and so I communicated by typing. While I was able to put my two cents in every so often, I often didn't know what the rest of the group was saying. The group did manage to summarize what they were saying in the chat box for me though after they had finished discussing, so I was able to contribute my thoughts at that point. Eventually, I turned my webcam off and by doing so, I was able to hear what everyone was saying much better, but I still could not talk. I have no idea why this happened. This experience made me appreciate Skype more than ever! While it was good to learn about other web conferencing tools, I think Vyew has just too many kinks that still need to be worked out.

Advantages:

• The program was free
• All four of us were able to be there
• You could type/chat and communicate through webcam (if it had worked)
• All of us could view and write on a document while chatting
• Had features like a hand raising button

Disadvantages:

• Connection problems for one person
• Audio problems for me
• Webcam issues for one person
• Made communication a very difficult and long process

Overall, it was good to learn about web conferencing, but there were many challenges with it this time.

You can see some of the group meeting video here: