Video Conferencing Web Based Tools

While browsing through the seven video conferencing tools, one of them really caught my eye. But first, I want to go through the other six and talk about them. 

The first tool I looked at was Skype. I've used Skype before so I was very familiar with it. This is probably the most basic video conferencing tool I had to look at. You can use it on your computer, tablet, phone, or TV. This is a tool that a lot of people use to just keep in touch with family and friends. It is simple to use and also free. 

The next tool I looked at was Adobe Connect Now. I couldn't figure out if this was a video conferencing tool or just a file sharing tool. I searched the website and couldn't find anywhere that had the video option (if anyone found it, where is it?). With this tool, you can send big files, use workspaces to create shared online folders where anyone on your work team can access the files, and can also set up permissions which only allows certain people to view the files. 

After I browsed Adobe, I looked at Tiny Chat. Tiny Chat is a 99 cent app or a free app online where you can join specific rooms to talk about a certain topic. When you first get on the website, there are a lot of different chat rooms about hundreds of different topics. You can also create your own personalized room for others to join. Although this is a cool idea, I wouldn't recommend using this in the classroom because some of the chat rooms that showed up on the homepage were inappropriate for the classroom.

After Tiny Chat, I looked at Go To Meeting. With Go To Meeting, you can host unlimited meetings, webinars, or trainings. With a webinar, you can host up to 1000 people, in a training session, up to 200 people, and in a meeting, you can have up to 25. This would work really well in a classroom because if you set up a meeting, say at 6:00 at night for all students to attend a discussion, all of your students from your classes could attend it. That would be fun because classes could see what others in their grade had to say about a certain topic. 

The next tool I looked at was WebEx. This was just another basic tool that allows you to share information and files. There wasn't anything too special about this tool.

My favorite tool of them all was Yugma. There are so many features on Yugma! You can host meetings for up to 500 people, can actually share your computer screen while video chatting, there is a whiteboard feature that allows brainstorming to happen, there's Skype integration, and you can record and playback meetings! I swear this tool was created especially for teachers. This is so worth the money spent because of all of the great features. I would LOVE to use this tool in my future classroom! This is the future of video chatting!

12 Academic Search Engines

While browsing through the "12 Academic Search Engines," I noticed a few that were a lot similar and like search engines I have used in the past, but I also saw a few that I wish I knew about through high school and undergrad! Archival Research Catalogue, BASE, Eric, Refseek and The Virtual LRC are all pretty similar and like the search engines I'm used to. In BASE, when I searched "authors," it brought me to a lot of Wikibooks. I know I've always been told to never use Wiki anything since anyone can add information to it. Is it the same for Wikibooks? In Eric, I randomly searched "history of China," and it allows me to narrow the articles by date of publication, descriptor source, etc. Eric also has a thesaurus readily available. In "The Virtual LRC," it has a tab for "search tips" to help students with the process. There were engines I wish I had known of years ago such as "CiteULike," "Academic Info," "Google Scholar," "Infomine," and "Infotopia." What I liked about Academic Info was that there were so many topics and they were all very specific. Topics ranging from authors to wars to religions to geography to literally everything. If you know exactly what you're looking for, this is a great tool. Infotopia and Infomine were pretty similar in the sense that they had different categories to search from and then can search your topic from there. These two sites also had cool designs which could make searching for a topic potentially fun. Lib Guides Community was different from anything I've used, too. I couldn't figure out if it gave lib guides from libraries all around here or if they were libraries from around the country because there were so many to look at. Overall, I really enjoyed browsing through these search engines and will definitely be using some of them for my next papers and recommending them to my future students!