Pushing the limits
We held a statewide videoconference last week, and really pushed the limits of the technology at hand. We had a great guest speaker named John Kuglin, who is currently the Director of Technology for the Eagle County school district in Colorado. We had 11 sites in Washington hooked up, and then John came in from Colorado. Things started off OK, but then a glitch kicked in that prevented us from seeing John. We could hear him, and he could hear and see us, but no video came through from his site (except for frustratingly brief two-second moments when his smiling face would appear).
So what did we do? Well thankfully, we were also running a screen-sharing session using a program called GotoMeeting from Citrix. Each of the eleven sites had, in addition to the videoconferencing system, a computer and projector hooked up. The computers were logged into a GotoMeeting session with John’s computer, so his Powerpoint presentation on 21st Century Students was being shared on each screen, projected in each of sites. Since we could hear his voice and see his screen, the presentation was able to continue with only minor problems. (John uses a lot of videos in his presentation, and the screen-sharing system couldn’t handle those. They had to be skipped.) There is also a chat window embedded into the product, so I could send messages back and forth to John and to the facilitators at other sites without interrupting the videoconference.
The added advantage of the GotoMeeting software was that, in addition to preventing a disaster, it actually works far better than sharing a PowerPoint in the videoconferencing system. The video quality of the average video conference is murky at best, and it can render presentation slides almost completely unreadable. Through the screen sharing, it comes through as sharp and clear as if you are watching in on the presenter’s own computer.
Just to be clear, there are other similar products besides GotoMeeting - WebEx has a new similar product, and there are others such as Elluminate and Adobe’s Acrobat Connect. Regardless of the product, however, it was just fun to try out new ways to present and collaborate.