Part A - Brainstorm Session

Our group met for a brainstorming session today, April 8th, from 10:00 a.m. to 10:45 a.m.  We met in a Vyew room titled Group Two's Room.  Unfortunately, there is no record tool in Vyew, so we took screenshots.  Luckily, Jeannine recorded a segment of our meeting using Jing and sent us the link which I have provided below.  All group members, Jeannine Baum, Gary Brumbelow, and I, were present.  Here is a link to the Jing recording of a portion of our meeting:
Group Two 4/8/11 Meeting #1

After a bit of brainstorming, Live Binders is the technology we chose to teach.  Gary and I had previous interest in Live Binders, and Jeannine has actually started using it recently.  She opened her account and showed us some examples.  See screenshot below:
Live Binders Example

We decided to break our tutorial into three parts*: I. Introduction and How-To (Jeannine), II. Detailed Example of Use (Molly), III. Brief Conclusion (Gary).  Over the course of the next week, we will each work on our parts, ultimately creating a PowerPoint and an audacity file for our own sections.  For the next step, Gary will splice them all together into a finished tutorial.  We will meet again on Wednesday, April 13, at 1:30 in our Vyew room.
*Group Assignments Screenshot

The meeting went relatively well in Vyew, however, Adobe is a much nicer way to meet online.  By much nicer, I mean more user-friendly.  We experimented with a few of the tools in Vyew.  We used screen sharing in order to let Jeannine show us her Live Binders account.  I shared a document by uploading a microsoft word document for the purpose of brainstorming.  I was hoping we would be able to work in the actual document collaboratively (like google docs), but this was not the case.  Although, we were able to type on the room's screen over the document which is captured in a screenshot below. Lastly, another negative for me was the audio lag.  There seemed to be a couple second lag after we spoke, so we ended up talking at the same time often. 
Uploaded Document Sharing

There is definitely more to discover in Vyew, and we will continue to do so in our future group meetings.  I will record using Jing next time.  We also need to figure out the screen sharing a little more.  It is a bit confusing.  We were so focused on figuring out our topic and assignments that we did not experiment with Vyew very much.  Next time, maybe we can explore some of the other features. 

As for possible uses for me outside of this course, I am still trying to think of ways I might be able to use Vyew in my own class.  With sixth graders, there are limits to the amount of internet use I can assign/expect outside of school at this point.  I will have to continue to ponder ways I could apply this tool to my teaching.  However, it would be great for collaboration with colleagues during the summer when it is difficult to find time to meet in person.  In our next few meetings, I'm sure ideas for use will come to me.