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!!!

At the moment I am busy with a course on online facilitation in preparation for the Emerge 2008 online conference  using the SAKAI online learning invironment .

It is amazing how much you learn by collaborating and sharing ideas, resources and knowledge in an online learning environment! Very exciting.

One of the resources that were mentioned in the lounge is the “144 Tips on Synchronous e-learning: Strategy and research, which is downloadable for free from the E-learning Guild. Apprently the E-Learning Guild “conducted a survey of its members, asking for their favorite tips relating to strategies for effectively creating, managing, and using synchronous e-Learning. Members could submit tips relating to any or all of five different categories. As is usual in our past surveys, the tips range in length from one-sentence ideas all the way up to multi-page discourses. You will find tips in these categories…

• Blending Synchronous Learning with Other Learning Modalities
• Designers of Synchronous Presentations, Courses, and Webinars
• Managers Who Lead Synchronous Learning Efforts
• Synchronous Speakers and Instructors
• Technical Production, Planning, and Preparation “

Very cool and handy indeed!!!