The new Skype (4.1) has a screen sharing facility that allows one of the participants to show his/her screen to the other.
So far it is limited to just one user (not both sharing at the same time). However, it is a very simple way to show the other what is happening – especially useful for using Google Street View.
The event took place at Dennis’ villa on EduNation – so thank you Dennis for hosting the meeting. And thank you to all for attending and making it such a interesting conversation.
I think you can only hear 3 voices (most participated via text-chat within Second Life) and they are of Dennis Newson, Scott Thornbury and me.
Google have just presented a preview of their forthcoming Google Wave – a communication tool that combines email, IM and collaborative work-spaces. Effectively it is a mash up of Google Docs, Google Talk and Gmail.
The above YouTube video is worth watching, even though it is over one hour long. It very nicely sets out both what the tool can do and starts to look at how it will change how we work in the future. Of course, there is always the question of whether it will catch on, but given that it is an open source, there is a good chance that this or something similar will become the norm in the forthcoming years.
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Google Maps must surely be changing the way we use maps – especially now that it offers “Street View” for several countries. Street View allows you to see what the streets actually look like, thanks to a Google car driving around lots of cities and photographing almost every street at intervals of every few yards. It also offers language learning new immersive opportunities.
A Street View of Madrid is embedded below, so you can click on it and drag the image around to take a look.
In today’s lesson with a student from Madrid, he showed me around parts of the city using this Street View function. Ruben gave me directions to guide me and then described the locations.
Google Docs (essentially word and excel presented as a wiki) are an excellent tool for working with students on their compositions. I was doing this yesterday with one of my students and we were able to edit the same document at the same time. Admittedly there are times when there is a conflict of who is editing, but if you are discussing what you are doing (which given that it is a classroom situation, is the most probable way to work), then it goes smoothly.
In the screenshot below I am about to highlight in yellow the text “Take good shoes because Berlin…”
Skype us!
