Elevate

I read about TokBox a week or so ago in TechCrunch, and after attending a great session led by John Spence during the Broadband Summer Institute, a light went on for using TokBox as a supportive technology for classroom VC projects and events involving H.323 VC equipment.

Essentially, TokBox is a Flash-based 2-way video chat client which runs in a browser. The part about TokBox which intrigued me the most was the video mail feature. The reason this intrigued me related to John’s session in which he described tools and strategies they used in a 520-student, 6-school event on diet and body image.

To ensure 100% student participation in this massive event, students across the 6 sites were divided into 4 color groups, each group focusing on a different aspect or issue related to diet and body image. Color groups from each school were then broken down into smaller breakout groups of 3-5 who were to discuss, blog, and create a one-minute video expressing their views related to the specific problem or barrier they were assigned. Students recorded and viewed each others’ videos using a tool which John and his team created themselves they call vCam. This browser-based application accessed the webcam of a laptop which was assigned to the breakout group and instantly recorded the one-minute video which others were immediately able to view and comment upon.

While vCam presents amazing opportunities for students to interact with each other, it may be some time before vCam becomes available to the educational community at large (if it ever happens). Enter TokBox! Upon the creation of a TokBox account, a url is immediately created using the same name (e.g. account name ‘user’ would have the url www.tokbox.com/user). For a VC project or event, a project coordinator could create a project account at TokBox, and participating schools could visit that url as a ‘guest’ and leave a ‘video mail’ message. Once the event is complete, participating schools could log in to TokBox with the project username and password to be able to view the ‘video mail’ messages left by students across the participating project sites. What’s more, the TokBox application has code which can be ‘cut and pasted’ into any blog, wiki, and even has site-specific code for iGoogle, Facebook, and other sites. Were it me creating the TokBox account for the event, I’d leave the site up for the duration of the project and even though the video mail is password-protected, I would still delete the account so that the student-created video wasn’t available.

I don’t see tools like TokBox replacing hardware-based VC units - the high-quality audio/video with the ability to move the camera, zoom in on individuals, and user peripheral devices such as document cameras makes the experience far more transparent than the computer-based solutions I’ve seen. I don’t know how long TokBox will remain free of charge or advertising either. In my experience, great web-based applications like these often start off free and then incorporate a cost or advertising once their popularity increases. The point is, as educators leading videoconferencing experiences for students should seek out solutions and opportunities which allowing students to express their ideas or understandings in the way we know people learn - socially and through language. TokBox may be one supplemental tool in the toolbox for facilitating this learning, especially in larger-group VC experiences.

What are your thoughts on the use of this type of tool? Leave me a ‘videomail’ (or, if we’re lucky, we can video chat in real time!) to let me know!