Notes from Mapuru - NSW Teaching From Country trial October 29th 2008
John called about 2 pm NSW time 29th Oct. He was in Mapuru using his Apple laptop and the satellite connection from the school. I was at home in Northern NSW using an Apple laptop with an ADSL 1500/256 plan. We started by setting up an audio only skype connection. Once we had it configured with headsets it was very good. Next we set up Teamviewer and started a session remembering that the person who was going to share their screen needed to put in the viewers ID and password. Once the connection was made Johns desktop slowly resolved itself on my screen. After a few moments we realised the the way people normaly use their screens could cause some issues with using screen sharing. It took about 10-12 seconds before the screen was refreshed, so if windows are being opened and closed and resized etc that all adds to the time it takes for these changes to be sent through the connection. So some experience with this will help with the presentation. We had a look at a number of things, iPhoto collections, websites, and tried out the pointer. (the Viewer can double click anywhere on the shared screen) We also swapped around Teamviewer so John could see my desktop.
John went to get a camera and encouraged Rosalind (Malngumba) to have a go sharing her screen. We went through the Skype connection and the Teamviewer connection OK. When it came to seeing her desktop and talking the 12sec delay (which she couldn't see happening) made it tricky, so she was talking about things I couldnt see yet. Malngumba talked about some traditional buildings and pandanus weaving that she showed me photos of. We started a new session with Teamviewer and I shared my desktop and Google Earth with her and that started some stories about land and place names etc. We finished up the session with John trying out video on Skype which worked fine considering John seemed to think that the satellite connection at Mapuru was about as slow as it gets, less than his dial up speed from home. Trevor van Weeren
