It was quite interesting to try out some new synchronous tools that I had only ever heard of but never used. As I live and work at a boarding school there is an internal synchronous tool messaging system that most teachers tend to use and in my personal life I almost exclusively use the chat function on Facebook to communicate with friends and do tutorials with students. The most recent synchronous tool I have used since beginning the MET course is the chat function that can now be found in Google Docs.
One of the difficulties that I faced and made some of the tools time consuming was the fact that my school’s network is behind a firewall and this made the configuration of each tool a bit tricky. With the help of the IT guys at my school we were able to getting certain things to work and others remained difficult to use. From a personal standpoint iChat and Skype worked the best and Skype has the added benefit of having visuals as well. Wimba was a new one for me and I found it fairly straightforward and again had a video function which worked pretty well. The biggest complaint I have with Wimba is that it needs flash and, therefore, rules out the use of an iPad. Strangely enough the tool with the most difficulties was the WebCT Vista tool, which I have never been able to get to work properly through my firewall.
Actually Wimba doesn’t need Flash: it needs JAVA. But it’s very much a limitation, for sure.