MeBeaming offsite students

MeBeam as a way to include students from Everett in a meeting in Bellingham

It might have not been a ITV meeting, but it was close-ish. Using MeBeam, we tried to make a meeting go live between WWU in Bellingham and the off site students in Everett. It was sketchy but it worked-ish. The students on the far end were able to get the information they needed and participate...ruffly. We had technical problems on our end to start as the external mic I was using was not working to start. Luckly I had my MacBook and the first half of the meeting was conducted off of it until I could figure out what was wrong with the desktop PC (yes that was a jab at PC's)

Outside of hardare, one of the biggest issues I had was with the feedback loop. Because the students on the far end were using a microphone and speaker setup (as well as us) we had several instances where we had a lot of echo and at times feedback (even with the echo suppression option checked in MeBeam). I know if the students used a head set it would have stoped it on our end- but I do not know on the far end. It appears that MeBeam does not have as strong of a voice clip as iChat or Skype.

I think with a little tweaking- it could work for fast meetings...but I think for future meetings I am going to have to come up with an alternative. I still like MeBeam and think it is still a great service- this was just a case where the technology just did not fit the setting.


For future reference:
I had to walk students though how to enable the mic and web cam. I wanted to put clips on here so that I can use my blog as a link for reference (or if anyone else wanted to).

Microphone settings screenshot

Web Cam settings screen shot