Today Kris & I are at a Wimba Best Practices Showcase. LSE already use some Wimba tools (see below) so it was the chance to see what others are doing and to find out what’s on the horizon that drew us here.

Firsly, great lunch at the Strand Palace Hotel 😉

Now it’s over to Kings for the main event. Part one is a Wimba talk / hands-on session in the rather swish Languages Open Learning Centre. The session covered Wimba Create (CourseGenie), Voice Tools, Live Classroom & Pronto.

LSE already have the first three.  Languages have been making use of the voice boards (audio discussion boards) for a variety of online discussion activities as well as to collect audio recordings from students for a while now. The voice tools’ podcaster is also being used on other LSE courses to deliver audio recordings of lectures. Some staff have also used Coursegenie for web page creation, it’s quite a nice tool as it generates web pages from Word. We (CLT) are just starting to experiment with Live Classroom which allows you to hold real-time virtual presentations – with audio, video, content (e.g. PowerPoint slides) and text chat. We hope to be showcasing it soon. If you’re interested in finding out more please do get in touch clt-support@lse.ac.uk

I’m still not convinced by the need for Pronto – Wimba’s instant messaging system that would plug into Moodle – but perhaps I’m missing something?

I didn’t pick up much at the hands-on but then I didn’t really expect to. The show cases were more interesting particularly good to see Adele Atkinson talking about successful use (PPT) of Live Classroom both with students but also with staff for meetings across multiple sites (in fact multiple universities).