Today was pretty much like yesterday. A little of the excitement and adrenaline has gone out of it, but kids still did their school work, I still went in to school in the morning to work and we had a fairly relaxing afternoon.
I went in to school because I had my first video conference, a video conference that many of my colleagues were also new at. In my previous job, we often had video conferences, especially after 9/11. Our corporate headquarters were in Virginia so we either had to travel there for meetings or we could video conference, we chose the latter. It worked very well and as the Internet improved so did the quality of the conferences.
After I moved over to teaching, I’ve been trying to get my other teaching colleagues to start using video conferencing for our meetings especially when we were spread across the district, but to no avail. We had many excuses; “I don’t have a web cam”, “We don’t have have the same schedule”, etc. Now that we have all tried it and are scheduling another meeting for the week after “Spring Break”, I’m hoping we see the utility of using this technology going forward.
The app we are using, Zoom, is pretty good, and more than adequate. I’m not sure why everyone has landed on Zoom as the one to use for this since there are so many other choices out there, but I can’t complain about it. The one thing that I don’t plan on doing is having a Zoom with any students. If its a group that would be one thing, but one-on-one is just opening myself up for potential liability. I would like to check it out for creating how-to videos and see how it stacks up against Screencast-o-matic which I currently use.
Living With Computers 