Jeff Utecht started quite a buzz with his test session on WiZiQ. It was
quite interesting how he got members of his network in the education world to join
the session through Twitter within minutes after he scheduled the
session. Everyone was rather surprised to find educators from all
around the world in the session.
He wrote a post "WiZiQ and a twitter experiment"
after the session. This session caught the fancy of a lot of
edubloggers, which helped more and more educators and learners discover WiZiQ. We
recommend that you just go right ahead and read all about it on the
education blogs:
Technology in the Classroom
Susan writes
about technology in the classroom and the confusion around using it--is
it redundant? does it add value? From a wider perspective, online
education platforms like WiZiQ help teachers and students connect and
collaborate globally. Susan asks what value these latest
technologies bring to the classrooms and Jeff has just the right
answers (see comments of Susan's post).
David Warlick likes the audio
David Warlick writes about Jeff's session on his blog in A Casual Sunday Morning Conversation; an excerpt:
"It’s pretty impressive for a free service, and I was especially struck
by the lack of delay. Jeff and I were able to carry on a conversation,
as if we were on the phone or standing just next to each other. I’ve
not always had that experience with virtual sessions. "
Chrissy's amazing day
Chrissy in Amazing Day writes about Jeff's session: "Jeff had only announced the session via twitter and it was amazing who turned up. David Warlick was there, Allanah King was in there, as was Durff, Will Richardson, Graham Wegner, Kim of course and many others."
Recorded sessions
Allanah King writes about the session in Networking and Learning and has a screenshot from the recording if you are curious. But you really should see the recording of the session here because it is pretty interesting to see technology experts from the education world negotiating the learning curve on WiZiQ's virtual classroom. You can also see a virtual classroom demo by Mark Cruthers (recorded).
Will Richardson on Weblogg-ed
Will Richardson, who made it to the session towards the end writes "And then Jeff tweets that he’s trying WiZiQ
and all of a sudden I’m in a room with about 10 other people from like
10 other continents and we’re all chipping away at it, trying to figure
out what works and how."
Ryan's review
Ryan has posted an indepth review of WiZiQ and
he has a lot of questions about using it (Thanks Ryan). We would certainly like to
answer all of Ryan's answers here, and we will do so shortly, but we encourage all edubloggers and experts to get together again in another big session, where everybody
can explore WiZiQ further, and the team here at WiZiQ would love to
learn from all your experiences on how to provide more value to the
education community.
We strongly feel that we should have one big session and discover WiZiQ's "breaking point" if there is any.
Jagdeep Singh Pannu
Update
David Jakes in the Techlearning blog
"Everyone can have a virtual classroom for learning. Tools like WiZiQ
open the door to collaborative learning worldwide. If you haven’t seen
this, just take a look at the options-and think of the possibilities.
How can tools like this, Twitter, and Google presentation contribute to
make your classroom permeable, where learning opportunities
exist beyond the four walls, and where information, conversations,
resources, and learning products flow between students and teachers,
globally?"
David is also curious if collaborative tools are blocked in school, "Try the four tools (Twitter, WizIQ, uStreamTV and Google Docs, which
contains the presentation tool) I have listed here-are they blocked in
your school? "
Barbara Schroeder at Boise State
Barbara writes, "This post is coming from someone who has used pretty sophisticated web
conferencing software: namely Macromedia Breeze, which is now called Adobe Connect Professional. Someone from the EdTech department here at Boise State told me about WiZiQ, and I first thought, “yeah, well I’m sure it’s pretty basic.” NOT."
You can go right ahead to Barbara's post and read the rest here.
Durff enjoyed the session
"New Zealand, Australia, China, Thailand, USA" "Five continents collaborating via a new free tool. That is amazing as David pointed out." Here is more from Durff
