Jitsi Community Reviews and Tutorials, 23 Oct 2019

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Using Jitsi: A free, no-registration video conferencing site

Description

If you have ever wanted to video conference with students or have them work together online, Jitsi is a fantastic tool.

Edit: Just a reminder, I do not work for Jitsi. I am happy to help where I can, but you might be better asking technical questions from Jitsi directly. Thank you. https://jitsi.org/

A

As some of you know, I run a website where I have a list of all sorts of web tools that can be used that don't require registration, I'm, gonna, try and take you through some of my favorites over time here and so today, I'm gonna introduce you to jitsi it's a free video conferencing tool that does not require any registration and there's no ads and it works easily on most devices, although with Android and iOS phones and tablets, you need to install the free app, but the app does not require any registration either.

A

So it's really simple students can just go there, install the app you give them the room that they want to go to, and you can have a video conference with them. Audio video. You can even do all sorts of other things which I'll try and touch on as we go through this.

A

So once you get to meet dot to jit to si the website, then all I need to do is just either hit go and you will use a randomly generated name for it or you can type in your own name and you can get go and it will create a room once you get to the room you were presented with yourself, it's going to actually, when you first get to the room, it's going to ask you for permission to be able to use your microphone and your webcam.

A

So you need to give permission for that once you do that, you end up here and then at the bottom you'll notice. There are the standard hang up, so you can leave the room turn on and off the microphone mute that and you can also turn on and on turn it on and off your camera. So very simple, three buttons down there on the left side of the screen. You would notice that there is a share your screen.

A

So if you're in Chrome, you have to add a little add-in first to be able to do that in Firefox, you don't but you'll be able to share your screen. You can actually choose when you're sharing your screen, which screen to share so you can actually share. If you have, for example, word open and you have a document you want to share. You can just share a word. It won't share your whole screen. It would just share a word. You can actually have a thing where you can raise your hand.

A

So if you have multiple people, which you would show up on the right-hand side, you could raise your hand and everybody would see that you raise your hand. So then you need to maybe you want to speak in as a large group. You also have a chat box which you can put in your name, and you can then chat with other people and use emojis and so forth. So you have that and then, on the right hand, side of the screen, that's where you have the tile.

A

So, for example, if you have multiple people on which I'll show you in a moment, you can actually have them tiled side-by-side or instead of just having one person up on the screen all the time.

A

You also have the ability to put in a password, so you can add a password, and you can also have this dial in number. So for different countries, you can have a phone number that they can call in and use a pin and they can use that to dial in to the phone to the conference as well too. So you don't have to have even access to the Internet. So there's your shareable link as well. So if I go to the next one, that's where we get a lot of the functions, so you can.

A

Actually, if you find that you have low bandwidth, for example, you can actually change it. So it's not in high def, you can view full screen. You can start a live stream. So, for example, you can connect to youtube live and you can stream out your web conference. You can start recording and we'll save it locally.

A

You can share YouTube videos, what's handy about this one is you take a web, the YouTube URL and you paste it into the box, and you can actually share a YouTube video between everybody on the videoconference, that's kind of a handy thing for students. You could actually watch a video together. You can also click on open share document. It will create an ether pad document. Ether pad is a very bare-bones collaborative document. Everybody would be able to then go in and make changes to it. At the same time then going down.

A

You also have some things about feedback and all that type of stuff in the settings. You can actually also change. If you want to take switch cameras or change your microphone, you can do that as well, too. So a lot of functions there. One of the things that people ask about is that in the video conference, if somebody comes on and they're not there being disruptive or whatever you can actually kick them out as well too so you'll be able to take care of that problem.

A

So I'm, just gonna show you how that works on the phone. So I have the app here and I'll be able to show you in a moment how this works so once they open up the app they just enter in the room name. So I've already set up this one. So I would just click on this and it's going to connect.

A

And now what you'll see I'm gonna mute myself is you'll, be able to see what's going on as well, and you can actually on the app you can switch if you want to switch to a different camera, for example, and you want to switch it around to the other camera. You can do that and you can also switch off the video and so forth. So there it is in the side-by-side mode in the non side-by-side mode. You would just have the main person speaking you can click on.

A

Whoever is the person that's speaking, and it can actually change to that person. So I could switch it to me, for example, but the side-by-side works very well, if you're doing a video conference with people and then of course, I can hang up and once I do that it goes back to just being a video like this. So that's jitsi. It's super simple to work with. It works with laptops or desktops works with Android works with iOS with Android and iOS.

A

You just need the free app, no registration required on any of those devices and you'll be able to have a live and a live conference which you can actually put a password and you can save you like. You can record it. You can live stream, it there's just so many functions to jitsi. So hopefully that helps you. If you have any questions, let me know and if you're interested in more of these videos, you can also subscribe. Thank you. Bye.