Thanks to the Educational Change blog, I learned about using Vyew with Skype as a study tool. An opportunity to use the Vyew part came up this week when a student needed some help in physics but I couldn’t commit the time face-to-face.

“I’ll call you at 5pm,” I told the student. I knew it would be a challenge to study with this kid simply over the phone. That’s about the time I remembered reading something about some kind of Web 2.0 tool that kids were using to study for tests. After a quick consult of my delicious links, I found my way back to Vyew.

I sent a share invitation to the student via email and once I got him on the phone, I asked him to check for my message. In a minute or so, he was on. We solved momentum problems for the next 45 minutes.

Vyew is billed is always-on collaboration that’s browser based. Some of the features I’ve found useful:

  • Your room remains intact until you return. That means that study sessions on the whiteboard are still there when you log on again.
  • Insert images, documents, slide shows, and so on. Then annotate on top of them.
  • Take a screen capture and share it.
  • Integrated text chat is right there on screen. I recommend a concurrent phone converstaion for most talk, but this could be a good area to ask side questions without interrupting the main conversation.

Thanks very much to Patrick Aroune at Educational Change for the Vyew tip.