Gina

Last night I visited the class chat room.   No one was there when I first logged on, but then one by one 4 other people showed up!  It was fun chatting with classmates.  There was a lot of different conversations going on, so sometimes a question someone asked wouldn’t get answered.  For this reason, I couldn’t really see it being used for group instruction; however, I have used the Vista chat room in the past to work in small groups and that was pretty successful. 

One difference I noticed between Meebo and Vista was that Meebo allows users to change fonts and colors while typing, and even add emoticons.  I really liked that feature.  Also, Meebo shows the different users names in varying colors, so it is easier to keep track of who said what.  One disadvantage to Meebo is that you can only scroll back so far to see what was said previously.  With Vista, I believe you can scroll back through the entire conversation.

Note added 6/27: I wrote that before we were able to access the chat logs, which is a great tool in Meebo that is unavailable in Vista.