Ustream Cohosts for Conference Presentations
I try to ustream as many professional development activities and conference presentations as people will allow. Last Friday, a group of us played around with the Ustream cohosts feature. I have no idea how long it has been available, but I just noticed it. The steps are fairly simple.
- Start a broadcast.
- Select the “cohost” tab and click “Launch Cohost.”
- Choose an existing stream or an audience member for your cohost.
- Approve their streams.
- Arrange the windows.
For conference presentations, I suggest the following:
Use 3 computers with 3 ustream accounts. The primary ustreamer should be at the presentation controlling the camera on the presenter. The second ustreamer will run the presentation slides and the third ustreamer will run a stream of the backchannel chatroom. The primary ustreamer can add the other two and control the size of the windows during the presentation (live editing). The second and third ustreamers can run camtwist or a similar product to stream their desktops. With this setup, the final recording will include presentation slides, presentor video and the scrolling backchannel chat. I would love to try this, but am not scheduled to attend conferences any time soon. Hopefully someone else will have the opportunity.
March 30th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
I loved testing cohost with you Jen. Just not quite sure with the settings why it is/isn’t working. Will need to do some more investigating to find out why.
March 30th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Thank you for this really useful tip. I’ll try to use it in the future.
It’s a shame it didn’t arrive some days earlier so as to test it on the Computer Science Didactics conference in Patras, Greece March 28-30/2008…
BTW, some ustream recs in greek and english can be found at http://blog.edu.gr/archives/tag/4csdidactics and ustream.tv/stylianosm.
May 1st, 2008 at 9:02 am
We’ve been playing with this today, but I noticed that the recorded sessions strip out all of the cohost input. Was that your experience too?