Birds of a Feather: Searching for Mr. Goodware

I just came in late to Scott Merrick and Joan Roehre‘s birds of a feather session on desktop videoconferencing.

Here’s some of the tools mentioned.

  • iVisit – PC & Mac. iVisit to iVisit connections. Has a push to talk button to help reduce echo. They have a server for education – for schools and for higher ed. They also have regular rooms.
  • Sightspeed. PC & Mac. Sightspeed to Sightspeed connections. Multiparty calls.
  • Skype PC only for video. Audio works on both PC & Mac.
  • Xmeeting for Mac. H.323 desktop videoconferencing. Among the group we had tested it with Tandberg, Polycom, and another bridge – I didn’t catch which one it was. Possibly Codian by the sound of it.
  • Ekiga – H323 desktop videoconferencing.
  • iChat AV is the Mac to Mac videoconferencing tool. Awesome quality but can’t connect to PCs.

Hardware
Polycom Communicator. You can do an audio conference with anyone (Skype plus other stuff) and be able to have a roomful of kids talking with someone and not have the echo issues. We talked about how the Polycom Communicator makes the lag go away. Read Scott’s blog entry about it. How does it do that???? It’s so cool! Also Scott’s entry about his connection with kids.

On the side, netvibes is what Scott uses for his RSS agreggator.

Joan: Kids are resilient and accepting of whatever technology you use for collaborative projects over VC. Kenosha is using Breeze to do in district cross platform collaboration.

Joan & Scott meet in this education site for videoconferencing rooms from Illinois. But you can use it if you’re outside IL.

Joan shared a video of Kenosha teachers sharing their use of web cams and teacher mentoring and using iSight cameras. The new teacher could see the mentor teachers class to learn how she was doing discipline, daily schedule, etc. The mentor teacher was in a different building. The two of them talked daily about how their daily work was going. Joan is getting several more iSight cameras for professional development like this. And she’s going to put this movie on her blog soon!

A great informal sharing session!
Conference Tags: necc necc06

0 replies on “Birds of a Feather: Searching for Mr. Goodware”

  1. I just purchased a polycom communicator and tried running xmeeting on a mac laptop with the h323 protocol — but people at the other end heard an echo. A colleague using the same device with Skype found not echo problem. Any help with specific setting and code to eliminate this problem would be most appreciated.
    Thanks!
    -Dan

  2. Dan, unfortunately I don’t know the answer to that. But you could try contacting Scott Merrick from his blog above – comment on his post about the communicator. He might have an idea.

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