The Favorite VC: Elluminate Live

A couple of months ago, I posted a survey questioning several groups of people about their favorite virtual classroom (VC) for language teaching. The following VCs were on the survey:

1. Web Ex
2. Adobe Connect Pro
3. Elluminate Live
4. Spreed
5. Web Train
6. Instant Presenter
7. Dim Dim
8. Digital Samba
9. Saba Centra
10. Windows live
11. Vyew
12. Fuze
13. Electa
14. Second Life
15. Other (please specify)

I posted a few weeks ago that I would systematically write about each VC based on the survey in the order of the most favorite to the least favorite. The favorite VC based on just 45 respondents was Elluminate Live. I will first tell you a bit about Elluminate, the tools and then a bit about my personal experience with this VC, which is also one of my favorite VCs.

Elluminate Live is based in Canada and is one of the only VCs who has kept their target and focus on the education market and that may be one reason why it is one of the top VCs for many educators. One of the features of Elluminate is that it is available to low bandwidth users as well as high bandwidth users. Through Elluminate's 'Fire & Ice' program, they have entered rural markets in third world countries and have connected schools in these countries with each other as well as students/schools in the USA and Canada.

Besides being one of the most stable VCs I have used, the Elluminate Live classroom also has many tools available to language teachers that are essential for effective live online language learning, which include the following:

Video-up to six people can be on video at a time.
VOIP-up to six people can speak at the same time.
Whiteboard-available for the teacher and the students to collaborate.
Clip Art-there are some ready-made pictures for the teachers to use on the whiteboard--one of the only classrooms that provides this feature as far as I know.
Text chat-the students and teacher can chat with each other and send private messages as well (although moderators can see everything).
Web browsing-the teacher and students can look at different web-pages together.
Screen sharing-the teacher and/or students can share their entire computer screen if they want to.
Application sharing-the teacher and/or students can share one part of their computer if they want to.
File sharing-the teacher can send word and pdf documents this way.
Clock-a clock can be used to track how much time an activity is taking.  The teacher can make this private or available to the students to see as well.  This feature is only available in Elluminate as far as I am aware.
Survey-the teacher can survey the students on various topics.
Quizzes-a quiz function is also available to the teachers.
Elluminate Plan--in the professional version, this allows the teacher to upload everything ahead of time and to have the session completely planned up to the minute--a very useful tool.
Recording-in the professional version, one can record the lesson and make it available to one's students.

I first started using Elluminate a few years ago and it quickly became one of my favorite VCs because it was stable and quite frankly fun to use.  The clipart, the clock, the whiteboard tools and the web browsing are the tools that made this one of my favorite VCs. I have used it in large groups as well as in one-to-one teaching situations.  To better illustrate how this VC works, I will include some videos made during some pilots conducted in 2009.

The following is a short clip of a lesson conducted with a group of middle school students in China:






Now, here is a short clip of a group of students in Burkina Faso:

Survey: What is Your Favorite Virtual Classroom for Language Teaching?

A couple of weeks ago, I was seeing some lively discussions on a forum that I frequent about virtual classrooms (VCs) and the use of them by language teachers. Some had specific features they wanted to have and others just said they only use Skype. So, I thought it would be interesting to survey different people who teach languages on the internet and see what the preferred virtual classroom really is. When I set up the survey, there were three questions that I wanted answered, which were:

1) What VCs do live online language teachers actually use?
2) What VCs are live online language teachers familiar with?
3) Is using Skype alone effective language teaching?

Although I only received about 45 responses, I found the responses quite fascinating. I've decided to present the results in a series of blog postings instead of just one as I originally planned since I did get so much information. I thought I would start with a review of each of the virtual classrooms on the survey starting with the most popular to the least popular. In each posting I will discuss the tools and limitations of the particular VC. Later on, I will then discuss the open-ended responses about the effectiveness of using just Skype in language teaching. There were many differing opinions and it will be interesting to sort through and to share. So, come on back and give your opinion as I systematically report the results.

Why do you tweet? Isn't it another time waster like Facebook?

A few years ago, shortly after I started on facebook, a friend sent me an invitation to try out twitter. I signed up and immediately did not understand it. I set the privacy so high that only my friend could see my tweets and I faithfully tweeted what I was doing 'teaching an engineer today', 'going to the hospital, high school and paper company today to teach', etc. It wasn't until I saw a presentation at an online conference presented by someone (the details completely escape me) that I finally 'got' it and so I opened up my tweets and started following people, Retweeting (I'm the queen of that) and dialoguing with educators. My whole life just expanded and I have learned so much from the network of people I have met through twitter. When I had the good fortune of attending the BESIG conference in Poland last November, I even got to meet and talk with several of my favorite twitter friends, which was great! If you are an educator and are interested in networking with like-minded teachers and receiving links of blog postings you would never find, I would highly suggest joining twitter.

Now to answer the question above--is it a time waster like facebook? My answer is that is can be if you don't discipline yourself, but it is so full of information that it might actually save you time. One good thing about twitter is that you can ask a question and eventually someone will come up with an answer. So, if you want to know what a good tool is for podcasting and tweet the question, you will get several answers and places to turn to from real live people as opposed to googling everything, which is what I tended to do before twitter (and still do at times). So, I would call twitter another avenue towards professional development if you use it right. (BTW, I love Facebook and used in moderation is a great way to network with friends...) Below, you will see a mosaic of many of my twitter friends!

Get your twitter mosaic here.