71. Skype

This week I'm working on an online presentation with my colleague Michelle. Michelle lives in Malta, and our presentation is to be virtual. How cool is that! So this week my tool of choice for working with Michelle is Skype. Skype is VoIP, voice over internet protocol, which allows you to communicate laptop to laptop for "free", although free is an ambiguous term. Someone has to pay for the broadband connection, speed and data costs. The software is free
Skype allows us to text chat (IM), audio chat which we do a lot of, file share and video conference. It's the video conferencing that uses up the band width. I have used the audio function and had a conference call with up to 10 of my colleagues, but the dynamics of having that many people online together and keeping everyone online, some dropped off, was hard work, and not an easily repeated exercise.
With Skype of course you can ring from your laptop a landline for a very low cost, and from a laptop to a cell phone for a relatively low cost, relatively low being an ambiguous term too.
Michelle has an iPhone with Skype downloaded, so she connects from that form time to time. As a way of keeping in touch, working collaboratively Sykpe is my tool. In an educational setting I'm sure the usage would be much the same. Interviews, collaboration, communication file sharing, video conferencing to see the world through someone else's eyes. (I once skyped a friend to show them what the ice and snow looked like.)
Skype has a blog too which has some good ideas, uesful infroamtion on it, including a couple of movies, Skype in plain English!
I'm sure there are other VoIP's out there that you use and other ways you use this technology. Share them with me.