An Expat Educator in Asia

Last night Chris Betcher skyped me and invited me to join him and some teachers in Singapore and the US that were trialling some conferencing software called Wiziq http://www.wiziq.com/ This software had a lot of the tools that are common to this type of application. There are a number of examples of these on the web. My efax service http://www.efax.com offers one which it markets as a web meeting tool. I use another called electa http://www.electa.com.au/ to connect together schools in Hong Kong and Australia as a part of the G’Day Asia program with Literacy Circle http://www.literacycircle.com.au/
Yet another of these tools Elluminate, http://www.elluminate.com/

is being used by the organisers of the K12Online http://k12onlineconference.org/conference taking place at the moment.

IMHO, they are all much the same with the same sort of features. The big advantage that Chis and the others saw with WizIQ was the pricing. It was apparently free! This brings me to an interesting musing. Should we be trying to find all of the tools that we can for education for free or should we be demanding that some money be made available to support the use of quality, supported software in schools.

My own view of this, and it is probably biased as I try to earn a partial living by the supply of hardware and software to schools, is that we should campaign for good, well priced and affordable ICT tools for schools. We should then expect that teachers are supported in their use by people paid fairly for the job. We should not ask our colleagues to use a tool that is a bit clunky just because it is free.

As always, your comments are welcomed.

Cheers

Paul

Filed under: Ideas for Great Lessons, Learning for a Flat World