Technologies for broadcasting your class

Last week at Enriching Scholarship here at the University of Michigan, Perry Samson — Thurnau Professor, founder of the Weather Underground, and co-founder of LectureTools — discussed a set of technologies for broadcasting your class. He uses these technologies to broadcast to remote students while other students are simultaneously in his classroom. I was so intrigued by his demonstration, I asked for, and today I received, a demonstration in my office by one of the sales people with the company. What follows are my impressions of the system, based on both his presentation and her demonstration.

These are the tools that Perry uses in his class:

• SplashTop
• LectureTools
• Telestream Wirecast
• Wowza

These tools fit together well, but it was a bit confusing for me to get my head around. I’’ll try to give you a sense of what each piece does.

Splashtop is the easiest for me to understand, and the one that most people probably have the most immediate use for. At the most basic level, it mirrors your computer’s desktop on your iPad. In a classroom, it allows you to use your iPad as you walk around the room as the ultimate remote. You can control slide navigation while also being able to annotate the slides through your iPad’s interface. I never go anywhere without my Kensington wireless presentation remote; I appreciate being untethered from the lectern. However, walking around with the whole interface in my hands sounds like a real win-win.

LectureTools is more complicated to understand. This is a cloud-based service to which a professor uploads a PowerPoint or Keynote file. The professor, over the course of a semester, can upload all of his or her slides for a class. The service reads in the presentation file. In addition, the professor can insert what are called “interactive slides.” On these slides, the professor puts either a multiple choice question, a free response text question, a list of items (that students are to then rank order), an image (that students can point on), or a multimedia slide. At the appropriate time, the professor makes the slide visible to the class, and each student participates in the class by indicating an answer, writing a response, ordering the items, or pointing out an important part of the image. As the students are submitting their answers, LectureTools is collecting and/or summarizing these responses. The professor can them immediately share the students’ answers with the class and comment on anything interesting that pops up. This is quite a useful tool. It’s like a clicker on steroids.

Students, remote and local either log into the LectureTools Web site or use the iPad application to access the service. This gives the student access to a cloud-based copy of the presentation. This then gives the students the ability to do several things:

• The student can take notes in a text area to the right of the slide area. These are not shared with anyone.
• The student can draw directly on the slide; again, this information is not shared with anyone.
• The student can type in a question that is immediately transferred to the professor’s dashboard. The student can see a list of all the questions (and associated answers, if the professor or an aide has provided any) that she has asked as well as those asked by other students. This ability to ask questions anonymously in this way has dramatically increased the number of students who ask questions during class according to the results of some experiments Perry has run.
• The student can click on an icon to indicate that he/she is confused by the slide. The professor can see for any particular slide what percentage of students are confused.
• The student can click on an icon to bookmark the slide if he/she thinks it is important to review later.

I found LectureTools to be a compelling tool. It is a bit rough around the edges, and is clearly still being developed, but I wouldn’t have any issues with using it in its current state in any class that I am presenting with PowerPoint or Keynote files.

Finally, Wirecast and Wowza are a program and a service that seem to go hand-in-hand. Wirecast allows the professor to produce live webcasts. You would either have to be fairly technically literate or have an assistant helping you out during a class, but this program would allow you to either broadcast from a classroom or anywhere on the road — on location at a company, in a hotel room, while interviewing someone at their work site…whatever you want. It’s a highly capable piece of software. Wowza is the service that broadcasts the stream to the Internet audience; it acts as the broadcast station on which your show (Wirecast) appears.

I can see the usefulness of a couple of these separately and all of them together. What alternatives are there? What am I missing? Have any of you had any experience with these, or competing, technologies? I would love to hear from you.