[This clip best viewed full screen. Just click the monitor icon towards the right-hand side of the menu in the video player]
This clip covers a video discussion tool known as Tokbox. I’ve been meaning to post a walk through for this service for some time but the fates have conspired to keep me at bay until now. Happily I managed to complete it earlier today.
From their About Page:
“Tokbox is a free service that lets you talk with your friends over live video. Here’s how it works: you sign up and we give you a link. When you want to talk with anyone, just give them the link – they click and you chat.”
As you may know, I’m a big advocate of online video as a means of communication – and synchronous communication in particular – and Tokbox implements this really nicely. It supports several different communication types including:
- Synchronous multi-user video chat
- Community asynchronous video discussion
- Embeddable multi-user web conference space
- Concurrent streaming of YouTube clips or Slideshare presentations
I go into each of the above features in more detail in the walk through, so I’ll just leave it at that for now.
If you’re interested in seeing and/or interacting with an embedded instance of Tokbox I have one set-up on this blog on the Video Chat page. I’m quite interested in using this tool more frequently, so if you’d like to take the tool for a spin please let me know. See the About Page on this blog for my contact details.
Several of our teachers have used tokbox, but that is one still waiting on my wishlist. I like your walk through post. Have you used or heard of oovoo as that is another that I want to try. Oh, for 36 hours in a day!!
Hi Anne,
I did use it briefly, but to be honest I can’t remember much about it except for the fact it didn’t really grab me and included ads in the chat client that you couldn’t get rid of.
Ultimately it was my preference for Skype that won out in the end and I really didn’t want another chat client running in the system tray – especially one that I didn’t have any contacts for.
Really trivial reasons really come to think of it – I’ll probably have another look eventually. I’d be interested in your thoughts if you give it a shot
Cheers,
Mike
Thanks for the review!