Free web conferencing with Big Blue Button
August 9, 2010
Video conferencing is nothing new. It’s used by businesses and governments to conduct their meetings, and on a smaller scale, by grandmothers to say hi to their grandchildren via Skype. But in education, video conferencing has become more and more useful as a part of a blended or hybrid classroom. One only need look at Blackboard shelling out $100+ million to buy two of the biggest names in web conferencing, Elluminate and Wimba, to understand the growing importance of this method of interaction.
For those of you who use or are interested in using this type of communication, take a look at Big Blue Button. “Triple B,” as I like to call it, is an open-source, free-to-use web-conferencing tool that does pretty much everything that all the pay web-conferencing applications do. Web camera support? Check. Document sharing? Check. Chat function? Check. The only thing that Triple B doesn’t do is save and archive sessions, but its developers are moving in that direction.
BBB is easy to set up on any server, so go poke your IT department with a stick and say, “Hey, set us up with an instance of Big Blue Button!”
Related stuff
Instructifeature: A window on the world — Using Skype in the classroom
Dimdim: Web conferencing so easy and powerful you may never need to leave your house again
