My good friend Darren Kuropatwa who got me blogging in the first place introduced me to the power of the smartboard. He would create these great lessons and then upload them to slideshare. This was a great way to use the technology in the class to keep the doors open 24 hours a day. Here the students could see what happened in class. Darren also experimented with digitally recording his voice and podcasting each class. This was alot of work. Enter Camtwist and Ustream.
Last year I tried to broadcast my lessons on ustream using camtwist to capture the desktop aka the smartboard and my voice (no kids faces on tv... nice for the censors). My mac mini only had half a meg of ram and the smartboard and the ustream were constantly competing or the small amount of ram that I had. The experiment was finished when they removed my smartboard last year to be used in a different class.
Live Streaming by Ustream.TV
This year I got my smartboard back and some more ram for the mac mini. Everything is going smoothly now and a weeks worth of lessons are archieved at ustream. This is an easy way to keep your lessons and for student to access work when they are not at school. I am loving this. You might want to try it too.
3 comments:
OK, now that I've seen this I'm going to have to try it. Thanks for blogging about it, just the right amount of push at just the right time. ;-)
You Rock!
This is amazing. We received one Promethean Activboard this year. The thing that has attracted me to the boards, as well, is the way Darren has been posting his math classwork.
You can only imagine how surprised I was when I clicked from my reader to see how Ustream and Camtwist were working in your class and I happened upon a live math class. (We're home on vacation the day after our Thanksgiving.) I want to show this to the teachers in my building. I can only imagine the possibilities.
I stand corrected, it is a pre-recorded session. The image didn't sync up with the voice the first time I viewed it. This is a great example. It's all well and good to talk about what you're doing in class. Now I have really lived it. Thank you!
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