Time Magazine's cover story in Dec. 2006 told the story "about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before" due to the "new" Web, which has become a "tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter." Here's a small contribution for you to consider.
On Tuesday after school, members of the Northen Illinois Computing Educators (NICE) met after school to learn about teaching with interactive white boards. Two teachers compared the features of Promethean ActivBoards and SMARTBoards and shared their classroom experiences. The meeting was attended by several dozen local educators as well as educators across the country. How? Live netcasting!
Websites such as UStream and Operator11 allow anyone the ability to reach far beyond their in-person audience, by providing the means for live streaming. Users can broadcast themselves "live" using a webcam and an Internet connection, as well as record it for later viewing. There is also a live "text chat" window for discussion during the broadcast -- a technique that has been called "back-channeling."
And you should know, it's free. Is it safe as well? The Read/WriteWeb blog reports that with Operator11, "because everything being streamed over the site is taped, and because the users know that, they are far less likely to break the rules or do anything inappropriate."
Credit to Steve Dembo for taking this one step further and setting up a wikispace for educators (EdTV) to post their broadcast links. What's on? We are! You can be too! You are invited to tune in, and learn from our presentation.
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