Join Me
What it is: Join Me is an incredibly simple way to share your computer screen with others. It works on both Windows and Mac allowing you to share your screen (and whatever is on it instantly). The simplicity of this site is brilliant. If you have even a sparkle of being a “techie” among family, colleagues, or friends, you most likely get regular phone calls asking for your help with something. The problem: those asking the question don’t usually know enough to accurately articulate what their hang up is. Join Me is a simple solution, it lets you share screens so that you can see what the problem is and walk them step by step through the solution. Join Me is also great for the classroom, it lets students and teachers quickly share their screens for instant collaboration, feedback, or virtual meetings.
How to integrate Join Me into your curriculum: In my computer lab, I often wanted to share my screen with a student so that I could share a process with them, or provide them with feedback. I usually used Apple’s Remote Desktop for this, the only problem was that students couldn’t initiate the shared screen. Another problem I ran into was Remote Desktop dropping connections or crashing. Join Me would have made an excellent backup! With the increased use of technology, Join Me would be a great tool to help students collaborate on homework projects, enabling them to easily share screens and work as if they were in the same room. Join Me provides a unique URL for the screen share, enables a conference call phone number, an on-screen chat, and the ability to choose a presenter and switch control of the mouse. Join Me would be an easy way to extend the learning day for your students, or allow a student who is absent to be included in a live lesson (this could be students who are sick, students with a long-term illness, students who are traveling, or students who know they will be attending your classroom after a move).
Tips: When you use Join me, a package is downloaded to your computer to allow it to run. If you want to use this tool with students, make sure that they have privileges to download and run packages.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Join Me in your classroom!
