Netmeeting is free!

Roseann Krane (rkrane@srvusd.k12.ca.us)
Sat, 07 Jun 1997 15:50:17 -0700


Decided to keep sharing as so many of you expressed interest in the MS
Visual Success Advisory Team.

1) The Grant opening to schools / school districts in collaboration with
colleges will be announced in October. To earn the grant there will be
an application process which includes the sharing of course curriculum
and projects designed for student learning. So now you have a head start
as you know what is expected. Sets of 30 station licenses of software
will be awarded and I am not sure what else.

2) As Microsoft plans to share as much as they can foster with
educators, some of us are in the process of writing for them now. This
work includes enumeration. If anyone is interested in working with me on
projects, let me know.

3) We are conferencing together building rubrics at this time and had
our first Internet conference Friday afternoon. As some people weren't
able to get to their computer, telephones were used. But we also used
Netmeeting. I fell for that program! It is free, just down load it from
MS. It took me less than five minutes to install and set it up. It is a
white board that allows you to either chat or share applications. You
can just share or set it to collaborate where someone else can take over
your work and viceversa. I had my speaker and microphone attached and
communicated that way as well as by telephone. Only those with who had
the speaker and microphone could hear from that device. If you have a
camera attached, you can also see the other one connected. We had
twelve people conferencing. This is similar to cuseeme or white pine if
you are familiar with those. But this was a snap and great to use. I
have installed an ILS also if any of you want to communicate. But you
can just jump on any line and tell someone to meet you there if you
don't have a dedicated ILS server setup.

If anyone on our Tekboard, Drei96, or the Sysadmins wants to try, drop
me a line and we can meet! I did mine through tcp/ip but you can do it
through modem too. I plan to set it up in the classroom so I can take
control of the computers!

Roseann Krane
roseann@krane.net