Tag Archives: VC Community

Lit Review: Educational Researchers Using Videoconferencing to Collaborate

Lit Review: This is a post in a series focusing on the research studies on videoconferencing.

Fiege, K. H. M. (2005). Educational researchers using real-time videoconferencing to collaborate: Thoughts and feelings shared. Retrieved from ProQuest Digital Dissertation. (AAT MR09088)

Summary / Interesting Points

This qualitative study consists of an interview with 17 participants who collaborated using high-bandwidth videoconferencing. The participants were asked about their definitions of real-time collaboration and videoconferencing, how much value they placed on collaboration, their thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of videoconferencing, if they would use this medium in the future, and if they thought information was effectively shared via videoconference. In addition, they were asked about ways to improve collaboration in a VC, how often they used VC to collaborate, and what they thought was the most misunderstood concept about VC. They were asked to describe their ideal VC/collaboration system, if VC changed how they collaborated, and what their ideal method of collaboration would be. Side comment. This study seems to be a great model for writing good interview questions!

The detail of the responses from the participants was very interesting and intriguing to read. I could see some of those same issues in my work, and in other cases where we use it soooo often, the issues raised are hardly a barrier. A few of the participants in the study clearly did not have a good experience and thought it could be used best by shutting it off! Others had more experience and understanding of what could be done and how to set up meetings effectively, and they had much more positive things to say. The study is full of good suggestions for an “ideal” system which would be highly useful to vendors developing their systems.

One of the participants said that videoconferencing forces you to plan more and therefore have a better meeting. It’s “quicker, shorter” and you get “down to business quicker” and less distracted. Have you noticed this too? One board in MI meets via videoconference for two hours a month, another one meets all day face to face. Hmm! Some of the responses were funny – including in a videoconference you can mute the audio for someone that annoys you, or say you have a phone call and run out of the room and vent about the person who is annoying you. However, this brings to light the importance of planned careful conflict resolution!

Checklist

The really useful results from this study are the “pedagogically-based strategies” an educational researcher could use in using VC. These are direct quotes from Appendix B (p. 102-103):

Before the videoconference meeting

  • State purpose of collaborative meeting
  • Determine if videoconferencing is the appropriate medium
  • List all attendees
  • State location of all sites
  • Determine what equipment is available
  • Determine codecs at all sites
  • Determine collaborative tools being used
  • Determine who the tech is a each site – name & contact info
  • Create an agenda
  • Disseminate agenda to attendees
  • Test ahead of time – mics, cameras, lighting, audio, connection
  • Disseminate and discuss videoconferencing etiquette with all attendees
  • Ensure appropriate lighting is in place
  • Provide materials to attendees ahead of time
  • Ensure a level of comfort with the technologies being used
  • Provide an opportunity for attendees to familiarize themselves with the VC technologies

During the videoconference meeting

  • Arrive at least 15 minutes early to the meeting
  • Introduce or have introductions of all attendees
  • Make initial eye contact with all attendees
  • Point out all the features of the videoconference system to the attendees
  • Review the back-up plan in case of technical difficulties
  • Review proper etiquette (talk to camera, use microphones, avoid sudden movement and noises, speak naturally, be conscious of body language, posture, and facial expressions)
  • Be prepared to stay for the entire duration of the meeting
  • Ensure that all attendees’ electronic devices are turned off
  • Review where facilities, phones and fire exits are at local and remote sites
  • Talk to the cameras
  • If appropriate: Establish a steering committee, Address technology literacy and troubleshooting techniques, Set objectives, vision, goals and/or outcomes for collaboration, Review positive outcomes of previous meeting, Discuss rewards and consequences for collaborative efforts

After the videoconference meeting

  • Discuss and agree upon a follow-up procedure with all attendees
  • Thank all attendees for their participation
  • Ensure that the system is disconnected from the remote sites
  • Turn of all appropriate monitors and peripherals
  • Follow up the meeting with all attendees via asynchronous or synchronous communications
  • Ensure that the contact person knows when the meeting is complete
  • Ensure room/area is secure before leaving

Comments

Interesting definitions: DVC – desktop videoconferencing, and IVC – integrated videoconferencing. I bet you usually think of that “I” as representing “interaction”, not “integrated”. Have any of you heard that use before?

Besides reminding our (very comfy with VC) selves what the challenges are for newbies when using VC, this study has very interesting comments and issues raised by the participants. The wide variety of perpsectives certainly are a strength to the study.

The most useful part is the suggestions for the meetings. What do you think of this list? How is YOUR committee meeting via VC doing at these best practices? I can see a couple meetings I attend that do fairly well, but noticed some places for improvement as well.

Question for you!

Do you think anything is missing from the list? What would you add?

Lit Review: Geographically Dispersed Teams

Lit Review: This is a post in a series focusing on the research studies on videoconferencing.

Baker, G. A. (2000). Understanding the role of information technology in supporting geographically dispersed teams: An experimental study. Retrieved from ProQuest Digital Dissertations. (AAT 9994205)

Summary

This experimental study used the 2×2 factorial design to compare the function of groups with text only, audio only, text and video, and audio and video. The groups were playing simulation games that required them to choose between short term individual interest and long term collective interest. In the study, the participants used CU-SeeMe, but the study references room based videoconferencing as well. The participants were undergraduate students. The technical method of group interaction was compared with the quality of the group’s strategy decision, the group cohesiveness, and the group’s task performance.

The results show that the quality of the strategy decision had a significant effect on task performance, and that task performance had an effect on group cohesiveness. Video added a significant impact on the strategy decision, but not on cohesiveness. The text based communication allowed for greater concurrency because many people could talk at the same time.

Interesting Ideas

Important pieces of group collaboration: “the distribution of communication among participants, how group members interact in the dissemination of information, and the members’ capability to communication information and group choice” (p. 6).

Synchronicity is the ability of a medium to provide rapid communication in both directions and how easily the receiver can interrupt the sender (p. 15). Concurrency is how many simultaneous conversations can happen in the medium. Hmm. Twitter has high concurrency!

Comments & Application

It seems to me that studies done with undergraduate students where they are working on work that is just a simulation should certainly be taken with a grain of salt when applying to actual work in the real world.

However, this study confirmed for me how we work in the Jazz workshop. All tools are used – collaborative document sharing, Twitter, Skype, chat rooms, discussion boards, wikis, and audio conferencing, and videoconferencing – both desktop and room baseed. We pick and choose the tools based on what is needed. For the early planning meetings with 20+ facilitators attending, we use the phone conference supported by a text chat in Skype. The text chat allows for the “side conversation” or supporting conversation to what is covered in the audio review of the content. This way everyone can be involved but it’s more efficient. When we get down to the planning the week before Jazz and the evening debriefs with facilitators, we are meeting with 3-4 facilitators in a 4×4 screen layout via video. Here the video is critical as we plan, debrief, mentor, and problem solve the issues that arose in the workshop that day.

The important lesson is to know and use all the tools, and be comfortable with which tool is most appropriate for the task at hand.

Another important lesson comes from the relatively low level of group coherence for all the distance groups. It is very hard to get to know and trust others when meeting at a distance. Yet, in the Jazz workshop, we expect just that! We need to continue to be deliberate about ways to connect the facilitators before hand that we can learn to know and trust each other even more before the actual workshop occurs. It certainly takes time.

Question for You
What do you think of these results? Do you prefer a certain way of meeting with those at a distance? Why?

Twitter Me This, Twitter Me That: Top Ten VC Twitterers

Another session I popped into yesterday was Ken Conn’s session on Twitter. I was trying to hit two sessions at once, which isn’t always a good idea! The session was PACKED! People were on the floor and crowded in. I couldn’t see the screen, but listened for a while. Ken had some great tips and his PowerPoint and Handout are online at 123vc.pbwiki.com. One of the tips was a site that has top ten lists of people to follow. Ken also suggested for getting started to look at who people you know are following to add more followers. I had conversations with a few VC friends yesterday and who were wondering who else they should be following.

So I thought I’d make a little list for you. Top ten people into VC who are tweeting, in no particular order.

  1. Roxanne Glaser
  2. Carol Daunt
  3. Ken Conn
  4. Lori Colwill
  5. Angela Conrad
  6. Heather Weisse Walsh
  7. Christina Hum
  8. Paul Hieronymous
  9. Joan Roehre
  10. Rebecca Morrison
  11. CAPspace (collaboration updates, not a person!)

Who did I miss? Who else would you add? Please comment!

Enhancing the Distance Learning Experience with Podcasting

This TxDLA session is by Shirley Boyd and Debbie Alston. (Wednesday afternoon; posted Thursday due to lack of Internet access.)

Videoconferencing is all about making connections. Their early connections included a videoconference with students in Iraq.

Podcasting benefits students by finding a way for them to respond to the curriculum, improves their writing schools, improves their self-esteem and gives the students a voice. Can use universal design with the same tools to meet the needs of all students.

We can connect our classrooms one at a time to the world. With podcasting as a follow-up they can become friends with the partner class. As they become friends, we can have peace instead of war because the students understand each other.

You can do an audio podcast, an enhanced podcast with pictures or other content, or a video/vodcast. You could use the interactive whiteboard files to save and export to a podcast.

Examples of how podcasting enhances distance learning from Killeen ISD.
Book reference: Drumming to the Beat of Different Marchers: Finding the Rhythm for Differentiated Learning (podcasting creates the beat for different marchers)

1. Snowmen at Night book – about what snowmen do at night. They videoconferenced with a class in New York. The NY kids built a small snowman and brought it inside to show in the videoconference to the students in TX. Then they made little podcast stories of what their snowmen did at night. The classes on both sides made these stories. Each slide in the movie were a kids picture and sentences on what the snowman does at night (goes to the moon, goes to the Alamo, goes to the beach). This was a first grade class. The kids drew their pictures in Pixie of the snowman and the place he went. In some cases the students put their picture on the face of the snowman.

2. Another podcast they did was on the rainforest, also done with Pixie. This one had student narration along with the music. The podcast told about different animals and creatures who live in the rainforest. Debbie says Pixie is the easiest way to make a podcast – even 1st graders can do it.

3. In another podcast, the students had to create a public service announcement about severe weather, a brochure, and a skit for Roxanne’s Texas Twisted Weather (Don Foshee Grant) program. The kids for this project were usually late to school, but for this project they came in at 7:00 every day. They were motivated to come to school! The PSA included tips for preparing for severe weather. The videoconference included a session with the local weather guy (Rusty!) and also a videoconference to share their skit in front of judges.

Someone in the room shared CrazyTalk, a way to get a live image to “talk.”

All these files were saved as MP3s to make into a podcast.

For another session with Belgium, they used a “Huckleberry” which is really a set of mirrors to make your Mac into a desktop videoconference system with the camera pointing out to towards the classroom – the back of the laptop. They used this to desktop VC with the kids in Belgium. They talked together a lot, and finally found out they both have Pixie. So they found an ftp server that they could share files and started to make a collaborative book together with Pixie.

Killeen has many military parents, so they could check in from where they were overseas and see their children’s work as well.

Students write the story, then make a storyboard with the visuals, and then create the podcast. Pixie and Frames both save into any form you want for a podcast server, Ning or Moodle.

The beauty of Pixie and Frames is the ability to save into any format – you can use that instead of fighting with Audacity and other podcasting tools.

Resources

Great job Shirley and Debbie!!

Reach for the Sky

Angela Conrad, Humble ISD, is presenting about what is in her cloud. Blogging for this session is sponsored by October Smith, who provided the Internet for this blog. Thanks October! See 123vc.pbwiki.com for more information.

Contxts

  • It gives your contact information as a text message. (Thanks Brandi)
  • Can put homework in this.
  • Could put quiz questions.
  • Could send spelling words.
  • It’s only text.
  • Check the box, send me a txt when my card is requested, so you can see what cell phone numbers have requested it.

Google

  • iGoogle
  • Book Search – create your own little library
  • GoogleDocs
  • Shared Calendars

SimplyBox

  • A place to capture share organize anything you find on the web.
  • There’s a how to video on how to make it public and have it automatically update your twitter account – see the videos on the right side of the home page
  • Install a toolbar in FireFox (click Box and Save) – images, text, pages, videos, etc.
  • Some of her containers are private and some are public
  • Could use it in a research project etc.
  • It saves all the source information too so you know where you got it
  • You can view a list view or a box view
  • You can share your boxes and collaborate on what’s in them
  • You can embed the code for the box into another page
  • You can share so they can view or edit or contribute

Twitter

  • Use Favorites – it’s not Favorites but favorite tweets

SlideShare

  • You can share slides
  • You can embed video etc right in the presentation
  • Can bulk upload files
  • It’s not just presentations, other files can be shared too
  • Here’s an example of her slideshare for Texas History Mystery

Prezi

  • The zooming editor for stunning presentations
  • It’s sort of like an animation plus presentations plus zooming
  • It’s more like visual thinking instead of linear thinking – you can draw lines to make connections between pieces of the presentation
  • You have a bubble navigation so that you can easily jump to different parts of your presentation depending on your audience
  • You can draw your path for how you’ll present
  • You can decide who can decide who can view or edit

Ustream.tv

  • Use to livestream teachers with annotated notes when the students are at home sick

Bubbl.us

  • Free brainstorming online
  • Angela takes notes in meetings online with this tool
  • You don’t have to have an account to get started, but if you want to save it you need an account
  • You can export to image files or HTML
  • Just like Inspiration and Kidspiration but you can’t go back to the outline – main difference

And more…..

Angela’s cloud is collected all together for this presentation on Glogster. Thanks Angela!!

Green = IVC Hybrid

Several presenters from South Central Kansas Education Service Center are doing a session on videoconferencing at TxDLA. Kay Highbarger, Executive Director is doing the presentation.

They have 4 teachers on staff, including one from China who teaches full length Chinese classes as well as short Chinese culture programs.

50 daily classes daily high school over their network

Also special topics – Chinces, Spanish and Careers for middle and high school students.

Audra May, the tech support, has a PVX in her office to do test calls and connect classes.

“windshield time” is getting cut, VC is a solution for staff development. Districts don’t come in any more for training, “we will go to them”.

Early Literacy Discovery Time with Mrs. Goose is a very popular program they offer. She told the story about a class in Texas that sang happy birthday to her in the session. “Texans are just great!” It’s not just us in Michigan that love to connect to Texas!

They are working to show their schools that “are too good” to need distance learning services to help them realize their students can benefit from these full length courses as well.

They have a really cool 3D thing, but all their equipment didn’t come. They have pictures of how they put these 3D objects in both sites and it’s 3D right in the middle of you. It’s hard to visualize and know what they mean without actually seeing it. Can’t find any info on it on their website either.

The sender manipulates the object, but the receiver can’t manipulate it. They can also put the object on the server so all the classes can get it. That’s how Bill Baker described it. He’s at Navigator Development. It’s HD plus 3D. I know I’m not describing it well but linked to what I could find by Googling. It can also work with 3D glasses. Bill’s company creates content for schools as they ask for it – and then you own the content. You could then sell it to other places if you want. There are about 100 of these applications (brain, ATV, etc.) made and they are building them all the time. Another person said that you can import other 3D content – and there are thousands of those too. For example the content on Turbo Squid. They are working towards putting in this $100,000 ish room plus setting up one of their staff to create 3D content. It would be only at the education service center but not at the districts – because they are receiving it.

In addition to doing programming for schools, they reach out to the community, community colleges, higher ed, senior centers, etc.

They are the first service center for their state doing HD – they have Polycom HD carts in their schools and really enjoy it.

TxDLA Readers: Links for Designing Quality Videoconference Projects

Here are links to resources and projects mentioned in my Designing Quality Videoconference Projects hands-on session at TxDLA.

Designing Quality VC Projects PPT for TxDLA (without clips)

More results from my spring 2008 “Top Teachers” Survey

Featured Projects

TWICE Resources

Projects Booklet

Other Collaboration Tools

My Online Classes

Featuring Texas State Aquarium

Second breakout session at TxDLA. About 40 people in this session. Wish I could also be in Angela Conrad’s Texas History Mystery session, but I wanted to learn something completely new. So here I am in a session featuring the Texas State Aquarium, which is just a few blocks from the conference center. I think every conference like this (i.e. NECC etc) ought to feature the content providers that are close by, so it’s great to see this one featured. It’s also nice to see a new provider (new to me at least)!

Texas State Aquarium programs include teacher packets and cover all grade levels and topics such as Coral Reef Under Construction, Surviving Earth’s Ecosystems, Marine Careers, Oceanography, and Alternative Energy Sources. The sessions are 50 minutes, and they use 8 real time cameras!

Adrianna, one of the VC presenters came on site to talk to us. She gave us a nice overview of their programs. One of their cameras is in the water by their coral reef exhibit. In the coral reef program the students make a coral reef out of Legos! How cool is that! In the water program, they have a kinesthetic activity where all the students act out the structure of ice, water, and gas. Their programs include video clips from the scientists onsite. The example was of one of the vets checking out a bird to see if it is healthy. The turtle program has a little puppet show. The dolphin program has nice clips of each of their dolphins and the tricks they can do. Video clips are sprinkled throughout their programs. Another program, Float Your Boat, is a design program where the students figure out how to float their boat with the cargo of marbles.

Their programs each have very specific grade levels, partly because they are targeting the Texas standards. But they are very willing to tailor the programs to another grade level or adjust as needed for teachers. They are willing to develop/tailor programs by request too.

Gulf packages are $150 for 1-40 students. In Ocean packages, they actually mail materials and those are $200 for 1-40 students.

I definitely want to try out their programs next school year. Nice variety of programming with a mix of great visuals, hands-on activities, and teacher packets. It’s also nice to have another source for these types of programs when Mote Marine fills up too fast!

Woohoo! Finally wireless Internet in a session.

GooglePlex Your IVC Session

Paul Hieronymous, a Google Certified Teacher, is presenting a session called Googleplex Your IVC session at TxDLA. Paul is a consultant for technology integration at the Northern Ohio Research and Training Technology Hub (NORT2H).

Search Features

  • Search “time in London” to convert time for your videoconference
  • Search “10000 yen USD” and it converts the amount for buying your VC program
  • Advanced Search: file type: i.e. search a KMZ file for the civil war battles
  • Preferences: Switch SafeSearch for strict filtering (use with your account), also can go to Web History to check up on students.

Google News

  • Most recent news on “gaza strip”
  • Can also look at archives on the left hand side and you can see the news from that year
  • Then click timeline at the top and get a graph of the news. It goes back before the Internet too, so you can look at past history – i.e. from 1967. Mine the data to understand the history. (Hmm. Could use this to supplement our Lest We Forget programs!)

Google Book Search (beta)

  • Example – find the book that you need for the TWICE ASK videoconference you’re in. The entire text is there online when the copyright has expired; otherwise it’s just a few pages.
  • It also highlights the keywords within the book and highlights them for you.

See More, Even More.

  • GoogleDocs – shared editing of spreadsheets, word processing, and presentation
  • Use GoogleForms to do registrations for your collaborations that you post on CAPspace or CILC Collaboration Center.
  • GoogleSites to set up your collaborative project – i.e. having each class write their chapters in a sequential writing videoconference project. Emailing is a pain, so set up a Google Site like a wiki for the writing. (Can insert any Google Video, YouTube, Picassa, GoogleDocs, Calendar, including gadgets and countdowns etc.) Good for a classroom teacher page too! Could be private for invited members or for anyone to view.

Finally check out the Google Lit Trips. Google Earth Literature Trips. Digital storytelling with Google Earth.

In a videoconference you can zoom in to your location to show the other site. But you could also write a little story to go with your trip.  Use this to find out the weather at your partner school or to share the weather at your site too. Built into your GoogleEarth map.

45 minutes was just too short for Paul’s session! His PowerPoint is linked online at 123vc.pbwiki.com.