CoveritLive

Today’s tested application is CoveritLive, thanks to Chris, who left a comment in my blog from yesterday.

At a recent conference (NMC in Princeton, I think it was), Chris was using CoveritLive to post notes about what was going on. I liked it and asked him about it later on but never got a chance to try it out.

Now that I’ve tried UStream, and Chris suggested that UStream and CoveritLive might go together, I decided to check it out.

Again, the initial read seems a bit complicated; I wasn’t exactly sure what I might use it for. The introduction talks about reporting election results, game scores, etc.. I’m not interested in using it for any of those reasons, but I forged on and set up my account.

My account is SORRYAFK, of course. For those of you who might be wondering what sorryafk means (or sorry_afk, sorry-afk, or sorry.afk), here is a link to my web site that explains it.

Back to CoveritLive. My idea of why I want to use this is so that instead of taking notes at meeting (like SLCC or EDUCAUSE), I can use CoveritLive and the good thing about that is that others can join me, comment, we can post images. So it seems as if it does in a text version what UStream does in a video version. Once a video from UStream is recorded, it can be added into the CoveritLive, although I’m not sure if they can both be used at the same time.

I’m not sure why one might use both at the same time, since they seem to do similar things. UStream has a chat log for those watching the stream, which is the same as what CoveritLive does. Both allow for polls. Both can be posted into a blog or website. Although similar in some way, I think both are valuable and I’ll look to use each in some fun and creative ways.

One way I can see faculty using CoveritLive might be to chat with students during an off-campus synchronous meeting, such as part of a hybrid class. In fact, I hope to be able to test this out in the fall and have a few faculty members in mind to give it a go.

Here is the CoveritLive I started to test the service.

I’m going to post this blog and then link it to a few of my social sites. I’ll leave it up there for a little bit and see if anyone checks it out. If not, I’ll try it again another time. The good thing is that the CoveritLive will stay here for folks to see it again later.