What will they think of next? Twitcam?

Have you tried twitcam yet? Well what about pigcam or eggcam?

It is a relatively new way to stream a live video that automatically tweets your live feed to twitter and while you are broadcasting you can interact with your audience via the page and at the end of your broadcast it then archives it for you and holds it on your profile so people can play it back if they missed it live.

It has a massive potential in education. I can’t wait to get back to school in September and start using it!

We broke up from school on Tuesday but because of twitcam I have been into school on Wednesday and today of this week and am planning to go back on Tuesday. Why you ask? Are you mad?

Well on Wednesday morning Alice our large black pig at our small livestock area at Saltash.net gave birth to her second litter of piglets. She had 5 in total. Dave Garland our Deputy Headteacher had just come across twitcam so we decided to give it a go and do a live broadcast just after the birth.
We had a go and the response was amazing we had 30 people or so watching and live tweeting questions from all over the world such as America, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. We did this by just using a Samsung netbook with the built in webcam.

We were really surprised with the video and sound quality – it was excellent. We did have a problem with the archiving function of twitcam as because we were enjoying ourselves too much and we broadcasted for over an hour. The site didn’t seem to archive it so we decided future broadcasts would be kept to 30 minutes as we had already tested this out and it seemed to work.

For further details of Wednesdays broadcast see Jane Hart’s blog here:

Due to the success of this we then decided to do 2 further broadcasts on Friday. Footage from Friday’s name the piglets can be seen here:

This time we reached a larger audience of around 70 or so read more about Friday’s broadcast on Tricia’s blog:

You can also see Dave’s homepage with some of the feeds here:

This is still early days but we think it has fantastic potential to use with students. What do you think? If you have any ideas please leave a comment on the blog. We will be broadcasting again sometime on Tuesday where we will be linking up to the Boston Learning Conference (#BLC09). Also if you haven’t done it yet why not help name the new piglets via twitter using the tag #namethempiggies.