Web-Conferencing

Today our group held our first web conference and I have to honestly say that I was very disappointed and became frustrated with the technology. After extensive research for a site that was free, would provide for a group of 4, allowed for a lengthy session if necessary, and would record, we ended up using anymeeting.com (formerly freebinar.com). It was supposed to work just like the Adobe Connect sessions we've participated in during our other courses. Once we were all able to get into the session, three of the four of us could use our microphones but there was some problems with getting the screen sharing tool to work for each of us. Something happened to disconnect the session and once we all got back on, the presenting abilities were no longer available to most of us. We tried typing our way through it but that was frustrating and not an efficient way to communicate with four people with different viewpoints. Our total conferencing time was around 2 hours and we did the best we could to finish the brainstorming requirements and decided to finish discussing things using the Group Discussion Forum.


If I were to do it over again, I would have done a trial meeting to make sure everyone had the correct equipment and could get everything to work correctly. Also, if we could have shared our two ideas with each other by email and left time for each person to research the tools a little, we probably wouldn't have needed the screen sharing tool and could have gone to more of a conferencing tool where we could all talk back and forth without having to hand over the controls to each person to finalize the brainstorming ideas. Is there such a thing? 


After this experience, I don't know that I would use web-conferencing with my classroom. It's frustrating enough when technology doesn't work for you but it's horrible when it doesn't work and 20 students are getting bored with the delay. The only reason I would ever need a web-conference is if we wanted to talk with an author or perhaps another classroom somewhere else in the world. I will continue to work with this tool we used today to see if I can get it to work for me as it is always good to have a source you can use if you need to use it. There are probably other  sources I could use if I didn't need to fulfill so many requirements (like record or screen sharing).