Group Project: Part A - Brainstorming

For our first group conference, we chose to use vyew.com. It was a fairly easy site to navigate through, but it was something everyone in our group was unfamiliar with. The level of unfamiliarity, combined with our desire to get the first part of our group project completed caused us to not dive into figuring out the website much. We used the chat function mostly, but also used the voice option. It became difficult to continue using the microphones because the feedback and echoing was too much to handle. We did use the typing and drawing functions of the program to communicate our ideas as we became more solid on what our project was to be about.

It seems like there are many more functions that could be used with Vyew, but it would take patience to figure them out. It also doesn't seem like the best program to use with more than 3 or 4 users because the chat feature is small and it is easy to become lost in the conversation when there are many people typing. I tried to use the screen sharing option, but there was a connection problem of some sort that I did not have time to figure out. Perhaps next time I will try to figure this out before our group meets to talk with each other.

I could see vyew.com being used in the classroom to connect students to each other during group projects or to connect students from around the world in "pen pal" type communication. Having small groups connect eases the frustrations of the program and allows students to have better conversations. It seems like an okay program, but I would need to spend more time playing around with its features before using it in my own classroom.