I am prepping for a pretty major online collaboration project between my kids and kids in a few different countries, and I need a bit of help with my Skype setup. When I skyped with Peru, the setup was pretty good, but kids could not really hear what was being said. Let me lay it out for you…
Two laptops, one running Skype and the other with the wiki showing. The laptops are older and I didn’t want to crash one…hence two.
A headset plugged into the headphones and mic jacks on the laptop running Skype.
Sony mini DV camera running usb 2.0 streaming for the video portion.
So it worked well as long as we had no desire for the rest of the class to be involved.
I do have a surround-sound system in my room, but of course when I hooked that up the echo got mean!
So, how can I have a setup with a central mic, and a system loud enough for nearly 30 kids (!) to hear it? Is there some sort of echo-killing device? Do I stream it out and then have a participating station and a listening station?
Thanks in advance for all your help! I will keep you all posted on my efforts!
Technorati Tags: christophercraft, international_collaboration, skype
Ben says:
I’m no sound technician Chris, so my comments may just be garbage, but could you put some sort of a mute function on the microphone? I know my microphone (standard 5 dollar Best Buy mic) has a little button I can slide to mute and unmute. That was you could only have it picking up audio once the surround system is down broadcasting from the other end. My guess is that’s how the fancy Polycom Videoconferencing units do it. Only one person can talk at a time, while everyone else gets automatically muted.
You might be able to pull up the control panel and mute the microphone input via that, or just open the sound properties and use the little mute button in the setting. WOuld just require a simple click or unclick to talk or listen.
10th February 2007 at 10:52 pm
Jody Hayes says:
Oh, my class and I tried to Skype with Kathy Cassidy’s class and I had assumed I could plug into my class soundfield and we all could hear … we got MEGA feedback so I’d LOVE to hear your fix it!
10th February 2007 at 10:55 pm
Matt Clausen says:
Our science teacher has a box that allows multiple students to plug headphones into a single device (usual a TV for science videos). Would something like this fit your needs? Plug the box into the audio out from the computer and then more people can listen in. Check with your school’s librarian, these boxes may already be in your school/district, so you could try them out.
10th February 2007 at 11:24 am
Peter Rock says:
Have you tried Ekiga Softphone? Skype is proprietary.
10th February 2007 at 7:37 am
Mrs. Durff says:
Did you look at:
http://www.skype.com/help/guides/callquality/
10th February 2007 at 6:57 pm
Kristin Hokanson says:
Chris–
I am having the same struggle with skype– the reason is that skype is intended to be peer to peer, one to one, headphone and mic to head phone and mic.–Because it streams as web traffic there will always be that delay and so when trying to run it–
Have you tried Vyew
http://www.vyew as an option–
everything runs in the window and the voice comes over phone lines–just a thought–
I still have you in my skype as a contact from the den leadership conference so feel free to try me if you want to run some tests
will be following this thread to see what solution you come up with
10th February 2007 at 5:02 pm
Kristin Hokanson says:
Take a look at this article published in tech learning by Vicki Davis http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/. I was lucky enough to have Vicki skype into my session at PETE & C but looks like she is the gal to talk to about skype set up–great info for classroom use
10th February 2007 at 4:48 pm
Karl Fisch says:
We haven’t tried it yet in this kind of situation (hoping too soon), but I’ve heard good things about the Blue Snowball microphone for things like this. Read this post – and the comments – http://www.learning-blog.org/2006/12/05/video-skyping-with-china/
10th February 2007 at 3:24 pm