Today in the SIG IVC open house, I had a nice long chat with Joan Roehre from WI who is running Wisconsin HistoryMystery via Skype, connecting students in Guatemala to students in the U.S. and many more cool VCs.
Here are some of the tips I learned from her:
- Teachers don’t get Skype on their computer until she has worked with them.
- She makes sure their settings are locked down to receive calls and chats only from the contact list (CRITICAL for K12 school use).
- When they had a T1, sometimes Skype was using 75% of the bandwidth!! Now that they have fiber it is no longer an issue. From the networking side they allow Skype and make sure it has the bandwidth it needs.
- The teachers aren’t sharing the desktop yet – that’s too complicated.
- Visuals for sharing history mysteries were posters or just students giving the clues orally. (I’ve been wondering how visuals work best with Skype.)
It’s good to talk to someone who actually has it working well!
I definitely need Joan in my workshop. The one technology that we had problems with was getting contacts added to each other in Skype. It was the weirdest thing. Should have been much easier.