Aug 02 2008
WIZIQ: a free virtual classroom platform
This morning I had my first try on WIZIQ, a free online virtual classroom platform. And I am pleasantly impressed! I have registered for Wiziq some ago but have only got round to giving it a spin today.
I set up my session and invited some of my contacts to come and join me. The whole interface is totally user friendly and I got a message via e-mail to remind me of my session (which is just as well as I was still in bed and recovering from my hubbies birthday party the night before). I clicked on the link which took me to a screen telling me that I will be allowed into the session as soon as it starts. This was a bit daunting as I would have liked to peek around before the rest of my invitees arrived!
Right on schedule I was allowed in and found myself all alone in the “room”. I was then joined by a friendly soul from California, Alvin, who is also still trying out WIZIQ and who fortunately knew a bit more than me! He “pointed” me in the right direction and showed me where to use the pointer!
The room consisted of a attendee list, and showed me as the “teacher”. In this role I can control who ‘has the microphone” and I can even set it up so that more than one person can share the microphone (a bit chaotic due to the a bit of a lag which resulted in people talking over one another). Once I shared the microphone, whoever I shared it with can talk and use the whiteboard and play with whatever I have loaded onto the common area. It is really easy to load powerpoints and documents from your computer (I used a presentaiton from the common resource area). I was very impressed with the whiteboard as it even allows you to draw pretty nifty sketches (more or less the same tools as in Paint) but it also has support for mathematical notation! How much cooler can you get? It even has a graphing tool. Maths Heaven!
It has the normal chat window and you have the ability to mute your microphone. Eugene, one of my critical technology friends, joined us from a GPRS datacard and we could hear him crystal clearly! So the interface seemed to not hog so much bandwidth, a critical consideration here in our bandwidth starved little country! Yolandi from a rural town in Limpopo joined us as well and again, she sounded like she was right there next to me! I had a bit of trouble with the handing over and release of the microphone, but did figure it out eventually! If someone do not have the mike, they can put their hand up and you can give them control. We drew on the whiteboard, typed on it and chatted. A real connected classroom! At times there were a slight echo and of course the inevitable lag factor, but on the whole, it worked really well.
Alvin introduced us to Dragon dictate, a speech to type tool, and he actually talked and chatted at the same time. This could also be really useful for those of us without headphones!
You can choose to have the session recorded and it gets archived for a month. Our session is available here.
One the whole it was a great experience and I will definitely be using it for virtual meetings and teaching. You can even register yourself as a teacher and get paid for training!!!
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Thanks for the invite to join you on this little WIZIQ adventure, Maggie. The potential is enormous. As far as ‘classroom’ use goes, the lessons will have to be VERY well planned and structured, with information possible written up in a word document prior to the session to be pasted in to save time. We didn’t test to see if this could be done, and should possible try this the next time we use the application. The session was an hour long and time flew…..
All in all an impressive application. I’m already looking forward to the next little adventure (“,)
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Maybe we should keep it simple and try out loading docs for the next session (powerpoints and word docs) I wonder if it allows participants to also load docs…
Eugene, I think for the next session you can schedule the session so that you can see what it is like to be the presenter. Wonder if there can be 2 presenters?….MMMmmm isn’t playing (learning) great???
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Hi Maggie,
Thanks for your take on WiZiQ. Your words encourage us to do more here at WiZiQ. We try to keep up with the feedback from all users, which helps us decide features/tweaks in further development. Your inputs are really appreciated. If you have any suggestions/issues, please do let us know on support [at] WiZiQ dot com or thru any other social media channel.
Cheers!
Jagdeep Singh Pannu
For WiZiQ
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