Having hosted webinars before I was in the meeting room early and found myself going to in producer/presenter mode, sound checking, using two PC's and making sure everything was ready for the group, who were about to join my session:
This was the firs time that I had decided to present from my Mac PC and I was also using my USB Microphone,which I use to record voice overs for online training I produce. Why a microphone, well every time I try and use a headset with my Mac PC the quality is appalling. My first attendee joined, Nicky and had informed me that there was a lot of feedback, which was due to my Mac PC and the internal speakers. So, having been a Online Producer before I went into troubleshooting mode and worked through a list of possible resolutions. Plug a headset in and do an audio check! Voila, it resolved the problem, but now the set up was 2 x PC's , 1x USB Microphone and 1 x headset. I actually switched on the webcam to let the audience see this and luckily the comments were , oh it looks professional, much to my relief! If you want to listen to the recording here is the link: Guest Speaker Recording
The recording quality is not bad and once you have downloaded the Elluminate product, it will also confirm that a copious amount of feedback was provided by the group. My decision during the session was not to use too many of the additional tools in Elluminate, but make use of the chat. Elluminate does not appear at the top of my list of online collaboration tools I would use, as I have more experience of using one of the following
- WebEx
- Adobe Connect
- Citrix, Go To Webinar
- Genysys Meeting Center
In most cases there are a lot of similarities between the tools and the features offered as well as the look and feel of the user interface, but I have to admit I find the tools listed above much more user friendly, but this is my personal preference.
Reflecting back on the user experience from this first guest speaker session I felt that Elluminate as a online tool would not be suitable for online peer mentoring. It is a perfect tool for webinars and meetings and there a other tools that could be used more effectively:
- Skype
- Microsoft Communicator
- MSN
These were the first few tools that sprang to mind and I started to do more research and came across the following
I knew that Google would not let me down and I am surely but surely becoming a fan of anything Google. For the MAC users out there we have iChat, although whether this would be on my recommendations list as a possible tool I am not sure. The tools a recommend for a peer mentoring programme need to be available to everybody and not be restricted by a computers OS.
If you interested in knowing about what other tools are out there here are some useful sites:
Considerations to make when decided on tools. The following considerations are going to be crucial to whether I recommended a suitable tool or not.
- Free or Charged service
- Operating System bound ( Windows or Mac OS )
- Usability
- Adoption
- Implementation
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