In this chapter, we will see how we can interact with our students in real time, specifically by using an online chat service and a desktop sharing application. These can be helpful for distance education, providing new ways of communicating and interacting with our students (and between them) when we are not all in the same physical space. Because Moodle does not provide effective synchronous communication tools (the chat activity could overload the server), the aforementioned tools are presented as extensions that can support our courses giving them a new level of interaction. In distance courses with considerable duration, such communication can be a motivation and a way of providing support to students when we are online at the same time.
By the end of this chapter you will be able to do the following:
- Using text, audio, video chat, and conferencing to support communication and collaboration in Moodle courses
- Sharing your desktop, a collaborative sketchpad, and files with students, supporting distance interaction in real time in Moodle courses
- Using a remote desktop functionality
Google+ Hangouts (http://www.google.com/hangouts/) is a service from Google that allows text, audio, and video chat among Google users. This means that we need a Google account, something that we have seen by now.
With this tool we can do the following:
I find it really useful to use a tool like this in distance courses not only to give feedback to students and get to know them better, but also to create opportunities for students to interact with each other during group tasks outside of these tutor-students meeting times.
A good time to use this application is in Module 10, What's good music?—a theme that fits well with an online debate about how to define quality criteria for music. Students will be required to work in groups and debate on what they think is good music and how it can be assessed.
The chat option is available either on our Gmail account or in Google+ Hangouts on the right sidebar in Google +. Audio and video hangouts require some extra setup; so don't worry about those for now, we'll cover that later.
We are now ready to start a chat. We can search for contacts using the search form and double-click on the name of the contact that is displayed, or in the Hangout icon of the pop-up window that is displayed.
Note
If we need a synchronous chat, it's obvious that the (two or more) people chatting must be online. However, we can also send messages if the person is not online, and he or she will receive them when online. We can check if a person is online or not by looking at the bar below the photo of the person in the contacts list. If they have a gray one, they are offline (or invisible and don't want to be bothered). If the color is green (available), yellow (idle), or red (busy), it's possible to chat with them.
After starting the chat, a window similar to the one shown in the following screenshot opens in the lower-right corner of the Google+ or Gmail account, and we can start talking:
When we are chatting with someone, we can click on the Create a group Hangout icon to add more people to the chat.
Note that if we click on the arrow in the top bar of our chat window, it will pop out from its position so that we can access it as an independent window.
Chat, as we saw, is available by default in Google Mail and Google+. To add audio and voice capabilities to this chat, we have to install a plugin that is available at https://www.google.com/tools/dlpage/hangoutplugin for Windows and Mac users (again, sorry to Linux users).
After installing this plugin, we can start a voice or video conversation. If our contacts have a camera and microphone, we just need to click on the Video call icon on the top bar of the Hangout window.
A new Google+ Hangouts on Air window will pop-up, and a video of us and the person that we are chatting with will be displayed in the lower region of the window.
If we just want a voice call, we should click on the Turn camera off icon on the top right.