Group Leadership: Part A – Brainstorming Session

I just finished our Brainstorming Session with my Group 1 members: Brian, James, and Courtney. We met in a room on Vyew that Brian had created ahead of time. I was able to test out the some of the functions with Courtney and Brian on Thursday night and so it made today’s meeting go easier for me.

As a group we decided that our Professional Development will teach other teachers how to use Vyew. We have all spent so much time learning to use Vyew and feel it would be a great tool for the classroom. In our meeting we of course had to troubleshoot some kinks – things like microphones and seeing how to save things for them to show for other users – but all of those kinks helped us each learn more about the program.

We have divided our workload up into four topics which we plan to have last two and a half minutes each. We plan to meet again on Thursday after we have each started work on our part of the project. The breakdown is as follows:

1. How to create a room and setting roles for students - Courtney

2. Adding new PAGES - uploading docs for students to see - Katy

· Ideas for rooms

· Segway to #3 – Syncing the rooms or options not to sync

3. Using comments and sticky notes- James

4. Equation Editor/Picture - Brian

Advantages of the Vyew program:

1. Vyew has more sharing options than Webinar and is free unlike Adobe Connect.
2. I liked that I could access Vyew at school.
3. We were able to share documents and screens.
4. We were able to type a list of topics and edit it right in Vyew for all members to see.
5. We were able to Jing the meeting. (Brian will post the recording.)
6. We could talk and chat.

Disadvantages that I noticed:

1. The biggest source of frustration for us was the lag time in the audio. There were many instances where one group member would talk to add a comment and the audio would repeat itself or echo about 5 to 10 seconds later. Often by that time someone else would be talking and the echo would interrupt them. I am not sure if it was because of someone’s microphone or if it was purely a Vyew problem.
2. If we had the pages synced all members were put into the same room and could see what was going on. However if a member wanted move back to another room to test something out, the whole group went with them.
3. Another disadvantage (at least for now) was that I could not easily find a way to stop my screen sharing. There was a “Start Screensharing” button, but no obvious way to stop it. I am sure I can use the Help function to look up how to do it, but in terms of a meeting in progress that was not time effective. I ended up leaving the room and coming back in to quickly fix the problem so that we could move on.

Overall I felt that the meeting was quite successful and we accomplished a lot. Our discussions went well despite the echo of the audio. I am proud of our group!