TQ #6: Web conferencing and ELearning

When I first heard about E-learning about four years ago, I was alittle bit nervous about the future of education. At the time, I thought there was a possibility that my job might be in jeopardy in years to come. However, after now having the opportunity to research, expose myself to the technology, and explore what's out there, I know that my job will be around for years to come. Whereas there are some benefits that can promote E-learning, the negatives far outweigh that positives at this time. For this last encounter with collaborative services, my group members and I explore Elluminate. We chose Elluminate because it was the product that class was going to be run on and we were not familiar with this product.
As of right now, I believe my group members would agree with me when I say this, but we are not big fans of the program. After exploring with my team, we became frustrated and annoyed with the program that we believed was going to be better than what we had worked with before. As Kevin and I were talking, one would talk, then click the button/keys, then the other could talk and click the button, then the original (I say it in this way because we were frustrated with the fact that we could not talk at the same time, that we constantly had to wait until the other person was finished with their thought, only to forget the original thought or there was a need for one person to talk and the other to type to keep a true conversation going). This became annoying in that one person was the "leader" and the other the "follower". This also became apparent when we were working with different applications. It was as seamless as we would have thought. Another thing that I became frustrated with is that I could not see the person I was talking to. All in all, after our experience, I have a feeling that Kevin is going to tell his co-workers about this wonderful program that takes the place of their two programs they use to collaboratively conference call. And I am not going to my students to set up collaborative programs as homework. Whereas the program was nice to explore, I can't believe that this is one of the better programs out there right now for conference calling/ E-learning.
When thinking about how this program could help my classroom, I feel that there are too many glitches to make it worthwhile. For one, it's based on the Internet and that is never a reliable source. Two, if I were to give a presentation to a group of students through Elluminate, I would never know if I lost a student to a computer game, the bathroom, or another room to watch TV. I felt as like it would seem as though they were with me throughout the presentation/ conference because answers could be typed sporadically and if I asked a question, they could run over to the computer and answer but were they really paying attention. Third, I didn't see the collaboration element if students could not talk at the same time nor view a screen that was being changed as a real-time speed compared the delay responses that we experienced. All in all, I can see how I would like the program to be modified in order to make it useful to me and so far I haven't found that modified program. So for the purposes of my needs, I feel that I will continue to be quite needed in the classroom and not in front of some computer, teaching the students in that way.