I also realize that my subject can be a large source of frustration for my students, as they desire to do well in the course, but for whatever reason, they are unsuccessful and simply cannot solve the problems. It doesn’t help that we only have 45 minutes per class period in most cases, and I often have classes of 25 or more, which provides me with less than 2 minutes per student on average to work one-on-one with any particular student. Clearly, an extension of the classroom is needed to better serve students.
I have been interested in screencasting and the use of online video for over a year now, and I’ve been looking for tools to be able to hold live review sessions on the web for my students. Last night I started using WebcamMax to help set up a UStream.TV show that I am planning to use to hold online review sessions with my high school math students, and tested it a bit today while at the Illinois Education and Technology Conference (IETC or Il-EdTech). I must say I'm very pleased with the results and I hope students take advantage of this exciting technology.
You can see the result of my most recent test below:
For this project I used WebcamMax to feed into UStream, and OneNote as my platform to demonstrate the mathematics, and I found setup to be extremely easy. When I installed WebcamMax, I was prompted by the program to set up WebcamMax for the most common web apps that would use a webcam; one of which was Ustream. It all worked quickly and flawlessly.
The next item was to set up WebcamMax to show my screen, rather than an actual web cam. Again, the settings were very straight forward:
One of the things I was concerned about was how much of a hog the program would be on my system, given that I am using a relatively slow performing Tablet PC. I was pleasantly surprised that my system continued to perform well, even with UStream, OneNote, and WebcamMax all running concurrently.
I also was worried that there would be a significant delay between the time I wrote pen strokes on the computer, and when it was received by my clients watching the show. In testing it with my colleagues the delay was only a couple of seconds, which is perfectly reasonable. There was also no tablet pen lag while using OneNote, even though I had the other two apps running at the same time.
I highly recommend WebcamMax for use with solutions to problems such as mine, and as a general all-purpose piece of software for your webcam. You can download a free trial of the software at http://www.webcammax.com.
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