Here I need to figure out a solution to a problem given to me for my distance learning course. Question below states:
A
high school history teacher, located on the west coast of the United States, wants to showcase to her students new exhibits being held at two prominent New York City museums. The teacher wants her students to take a "tour" of the museums and be able to interact with the museum curators, as well as see the art work on display. Afterward, the teacher would like to choose two pieces of artwork from each exhibit and have the students participate in a group critique of the individual work of art. As a novice of distance learning and distance learning technologies, the teacher turned to the school district’s instructional designer for assistance. In the role of the instructional designer, what distance learning technologies would you suggest the teacher use to provide the best learning experience for her students?
When reading this question the first solution I thought was BigBlueButton and afterwards was Teamviewer. Teamviewer is very well developed remote assistance program. It’s an application that can be installed on your any computer device; pc, laptop, Mac, ipad’s, android tablets, smartphones, and iPhone’s. Teamviewer also has a portable version app that can run out of any usb drive. The portable app would have no need to install on any computer device and would still be fully functional. I have used this application for personal use, I had connected my work laptop with my home computer, so if I needed a specific file, for example; for teaching a class I forgot to place a specific video on my work computer, one choice can be to connect to my home computer and play the video on my home computer and watch the video on my work computer that is connected to the projector at the school or another choice can be making a file transfer of the video from my home computer to my work computer and just play the video from my work computer, if I had a student absent from class let’s say he is home sick and I didn’t want him to fall behind, I can send him an email with the potable app in attachment for the student to run his computer, or for a smartphone, download the free app so I can connect with the student and he/she can see the video with their classmates. Teamviewer is great for presentations connected to multiple participants. For the question above this application can connect the students with the Teamviewer and interact with the museum curators and take a tour of the museum. There is a chat function also available for students to interact with other students but there is no way to make group discussions during interactions, but the BigBlueButton can.
Bigbluebutton (BBB) is one of the best interactive distance learning applications I have seen. BBB can replace the traditional classroom by each component. Let’s think about the types of interaction we would come across when students would be in a F2F museum tour. Students would see the tour with their own eyes walking through the museum while hearing what the curator had say about each artwork on display. If the any student had a question they would raise their hand out, waiting for the curator to call on them, of if the curator would ask a question. At times to not make the tour boring I have seen teachers giving the students group projects where they would have to go back to the tour areas they visited and find the answers from the assignment. BBB allows this process to happen without stepping one foot into the museum. BBB is located on a cloud computer, a host site of the school, even embedded onto a LMS/CMS. For this problem from above, BBB is located on host site with a specific login. Everyone involved will have access to BBB with their own login information. When using BBB, the teacher would be the moderator who has control of the presenter and all of the participants; roles can be switched between presenters and participants, click on link to see all the videos of the features bigbluebutton has to offer http://bigbluebutton.org/content/videos.
References
bigbluebutton retrieved September 23, 2011 from http://bigbluebutton.org/overview
Teamviewer retrieved September 23, 2011 from http://www.teamviewer.com/en/solutions/meetings.aspx
