Sunday, September 28, 2008

Thinking of Vyew

I would love to teach a lesson using Vyew. I would have to do some advance planning to become fully comfortable with the tool and determine which functions I wanted to use with my lesson. Vyew has a free-wheeling nature to it, so I'd like to pull some of that into the lesson, but also keep it structured. For instance, I might have a lecture with audio and video, but the chat function would allow students to ask questions. I might ask students to share their work by uploading a graphic or an attachment and having others provide live feedback.

As a system for collaboration, Vyew offers several affordances, such as drawing tools, the ability to share one's desktop, the ability to broadcast video and audio, and the ability to import files to share with others. These are the advantages of Vyew as a collaborative tool. It also has disadvantages. PowerPoint presentations are imported into multiple pages instead of a single file with navigation, so the structure of the presentation can be unclear. It would take a lot of practice, I think, to become completely familiar with Vyew. It also runs slowly at times, so there might be issues if a lot of people are in a session.

1 comment:

Tracy Liu said...

I do not actually try to upload powerpoint files into vyew, so I am not sure how effective it might be. However, I will imagine it should be interesting if you do a presentation on Vyew. But you will never know if your audiences are really looking at it or they just open the vyew and do something else.