Group Leadership Project Part A- Brainstorming

 "Necessity is the mother of invention."-Plato

With people scheduling every waking moment of their day, there has been an increased need for more efficient ways to schedule meetings. E-mail is far too inefficient especially when large groups of people are involved. It took at least 8 e-mails between from me to my two group members to schedule an our to meet while receiving close to the same number from them over the course of five days. The original meeting scheduling programs required that each person submit the hours they were available and then the creator could find a time that works for everyone. The problem here is that people can not work with each other to create a mutually beneficial schedule and you had to look up you calendar every time you schedule a meeting. ScheduleOnce alleviates this problem by incorporating the users google calendar and showing the live availability of the groups members. We will show how the program works and demonstrate its functions. We will be using it to schedule our next meeting and will be done with storyboarding by the end of next week.

For our brainstorming meeting we used adobe connect. The advantages of this program are that it is easy to use and has multiple was to communicate. We could share screens, type comments and talk as a group. We could have used the video chat option as well but we did not.

The disadvantages of adobe connect are audio inconsistencies and cost. The more people using a microphone, the lower the volume is on each. At $45/mo it is prohibitively expensive for teachers and other individuals. The pricing works out better for school districts or large companies.

In the past I have used the free survice skype which allows most of these options and is free to use, Skype becomes more difficult to use with larger groups. I have heard of Google hangouts being used and would like to investigate that option.

Here is the link to our Adobe connect meeting.

Thanks to Greg Ferenstein for his review of web based scheduling options.