Sunday, November 9, 2008

(This was cross-posted on our shared blog)
Just before Halloween Kate, my mentee, and I connected our classrooms for a cooperative project. Using the online WizIq service, we tried to share a lesson on the four basic math operations between Kate's second-grade class and my fourth-grade class. My class created math problems, in both English and Spanish, and discussed how to teach the math to the younger, but no less eager, students.
Well, the lesson did not go as smoothly as we would have hoped. While we did test run the WizIq service ahead of time, multiple problems still cropped up on the day we tried it. Kate scheduled the lesson, but we were unable to share control at the same time. Her students' work solving the problems never appeared on my Smartboard, so we couldn't quite guide her students through the problem. We also couldn't get me webcam video to appear on her board, no was the sound clear enough to really be helpful. Needless to say, the lesson did quite meet our expectations. Still, our students were very engaged by the experiment, and we look forward to try again sometime this month with another collaborative project. Have any ideas about another service where we could work together online?

1 comment:

vik_di said...

Dear Wesley:

WiZiQ.com does not allow more than one person to control the attendee level controls [like transferring who has writing or video controls]. Also, please let me know the session that you conducted [just the URL] at support at wiziq dot com and we will analyze the issues and help resolve the same. Most of the issues appear to have come when more than two-three people had writeboard control. This works fine if everyone is on excellent broadband, but if even one person has a lag or poor connection, it would affect everyone' experience. Please write back to me on above email address and your session details so that we can help you resolve this issue.

Thanks

Vikrama Dhiman
Product Manager
www.wiziq.com