Waves @ Chris Dawson Weeeeee i'm first i'm first , I'm never first at anything weeeeeeee . Ok the moment has passed .
This is a very good topic , i am very eager to see the results of a head-to-head with the software.The rabbit hole goes deeper , years ago the The virtual classroom concept was mentioned an rejected by local schools an/or educators .Not because it wasn't a brilliant ideal an it would totally fix budgeting problems. but in fear that no humans would be left in the loop, except for the groundskeeper.
When the Adobe Education team demoed their Connect 8 online meeting software, I was, to put it mildly, impressed. A great business application also happened to be an awesome educational tool. Then, the folks at WizIQ gave me a demo the other day of their own virtual classroom software which shared many of the useful features in Connect but was highly competitive in terms of price and was specifically designed around the idea of classroom. I’ll be taking them head-to-head very soon, but suffice to say, both have some incredibly compelling use cases. However, until you actually see how they can change the student experience, it’s hard to appreciate just how powerful these tools really are.
A former student sent me a message tonight asking for help with her college physics homework. We bounced back and forth via IM with me sending her hints, key formulas, and answers to specific questions while she and a friend worked together in her dorm room on the homework. It was helpful, but this was physics. There are few subjects in this world that beg for diagrams and a whiteboard more than physics.
So I suggested that I set up a virtual class and we work through some more problems together online. I tried to be cavalier about the whole thing - this was, after all, a former student. Truth be told, I’d only used WizIQ and Connect in very controlled settings to just learn the basic functionality and really begin envisioning how I could use them in the classroom since, outside of the distance education realm (particularly in graduate education), they’re relatively uncommon in mainstream educational settings.
No time like the present, though, right? So I quickly scheduled an impromptu class in WizIQ, fired off the invitation, and, one Flash update on her computer later, we could see and hear each other, IM, and interact on a shared whiteboard. The whole process took 10 minutes, but would have been 5 without the Flash update and some initial confusion over how to enable their audio and video.
Next: A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a shared whiteboard is at least a novella »
The only downside is not all students have the technical savvy and/or capabilities on their machines to take full advantage of this. I see us going from this to "Talking Heads" as in Skype for direct F2F tutoring. 
