Thomas J. West Music

It's rather amazing how these things happen sometimes. Two days ago Dr. Joseph Pisano of MusTech.Net invited me into a chat room on the new Music PLN website to discuss integrating my Facebook Group into the PLN. While continuing to marvel at the amazing home for music education on the web that the PLN design team has created, I was also impressed with the usefulness and flexibility of the PLN's integrated chat room, hosted by tinychat.

Tinychat has the audio/video quality of Skype and the tools you find in many online meeting rooms such as Adobe Connect and GotoMeeting. It's embeddable on a website. And it's free. Free, folks!

Instead of having my webcam music students go through the process of downloading and installing Skype, creating an account, and connecting to their teacher, they now can simply go to my new Webcam Studio page, enter the password I provide, and start their lesson with me with no membership account or software required.

I created a screencast walkthrough using Screenr and hosted on YouTube to demonstrate the login and features of the new webcam studio. Talk about Web 2.0 tools in action! I got the idea in a chat room on a social networking website from a fellow music educator 5 hours away by car, integrated it into my own web page, and created a screencast demonstrating it also recorded remotely and hosted on the world's biggest video library - all without spending a dime or breaking a sweat!

Here's the walkthrough video.