January 24, 2010

TOKBOX - group video chat

Yesterday, I invited several teachers who have TOKBOX accounts to help me test the group video chat feature.

I created a video chat and invited teachers who were online in TOKBOX to join me. We were six people in the room. We could see (via webcam) and hear each other. I´ve read somewhere that you can video chat w/ up to 20 people.

We introduced ourselves, talked about where we live and teach, talked about our goals for 2010 and brainstormed ways we could use the group video chat w/ students.




You might say " I can video chat w/ my friends in MSN or Skype." Not really, with MSN and Skype you can chat to various people at the same time but you can´t see their webcam image. And you can only chat to people who have an MSN account or Skype account.

With Tokbox group video chat , you can VIDEO CHAT  to many people at the same time, whether they have a tokbox account or not. You can invite people to join you via TWITTER, FACEBOOK or even send the link of the video chat to your friends via e-mail.

The webcam images were very good and so was the sound. Except  for some voice delay, it was almost perfect. I regret not having taken a screenshot of our chat room. But I completely forgot about it.

How to create a GROUP VIDEO CHAT? Watch this quick TUTORIAL



How can we use this tool with students?
  • invite students to have online conversation lessons.
  • if you have individual private students, you can invite all of them on one specific day to join the room and talk to each other. 
  • you can invite all your students to join you and interview a guest. Then, each student would have the chance to ask a question.
  • Any other ideas?

6 comments:

KALINAGO ENGLISH said...

Wow - seriously cool, Ana Maria - sorry I missed your tweet about this (trying to spend less time on-line and this week contained many until 2am in the mornings while trying to unravel bits of code for my new template :-() - will include this post in my monthly wrap up though - seriously useful information!!!

Take care,
Karenne

Camila Sousa said...

Aninha,

Thank you for the invite :-) It was great meeting your on-line friends and getting to know them! Tokbox is a really useful tool.

Bjos,
Camila

Ana Maria Menezes said...

Dear Karenne,

We´ll have other chances of trying tools out together. Your new blog template looks clean and modern by the way. Txs for the comment.

Ana Maria Menezes said...

Dear Camila,

Thank you so much for joining me last Saturday. It was a nice meeting, wasn´t it?

Anonymous said...
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Greg said...

I really really like www.faceflow.com for video conferencing. Their interface is so easy to use and it's directly on the web, and free. There was a nice article on tmcnet.com's blog recently about FaceFlow.
Hope this information will help some people :)