Virtual Conferencing

During the past few terms we, Janoo and Nileesha, have been working with our Australian teammates, Sean and Curtlie, to complete this Web 2.0 project. To communicate our ideas and thoughts to each other we used virtual conferencing via Skype and Elluminate.

Evaluation

As a pair, we found that Skype was more successful than Elluminate. This was because we experienced some difficulties and volatility with Elluminate on the school network.

A highlight of using Skype was that it was easy to use, and worked well with a webcam. We were able to meet new people and it showed us how advanced technology really is. We were able to chat with our teammates who were miles away but we could still see and talk to them. Personally, using these programmes did not increase our motivation levels (we are fairly motivated anyway) but we can see how it may have had a positive affect on others as it definitely added excitement to the classroom. Some of the difficulties of using Skype were the time differences between countries, and managing to synchronise with Australian class times. At first we had some technical difficulties hearing them, but got that sorted out. It would have been ideal if we were able to Skype our partners whenever we wanted to but our lessons were not at the same time so we could not talk to them as often as we would have liked. Melbourne, Australia is two hours behind us.

The website that we designed has incorporated some of our partners' website ideas and some of our own. We explored some of the issues together, which we found interesting and exciting. The Australian class was doing a slightly different webzine to us, as they were a Media class and we are a Technology class. However, using virtual conferencing helped us to communicate quickly and efficiently and we thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Overall, we think that virtual conferencing has both positives and negatives. We feel that projects like this should continue to carry on in the future as it introduces students to new technology and breaks down classroom walls and geographical boundaries. We were the first people in our school to do something like this so it was a learning curve and we probably had more technical difficulties than usual as we were first-time users.

References and Acknowledgements: