In the course of any given week I register for at least two dozen different websites and services that I think might be of interest to educators. So when I registered for Wetoku’s private beta a couple of weeks ago, I quickly forgot about it until Read Write Web ran a story about it last night. After reading the story I went back through my email and activated my Wetoku beta account.

Wetoku is a free service for quickly conducting, recording, and sharing video interviews using your webcam. To conduct an interview just log-in to your account, click “start new interview,” and send the invitation link to whomever you want to interview. Wetoku records the videos from both participants in the interview. When you embed the recording, the videos of both participants appear side by side (see the sample from RWW here).

If you would like to try Wetoku, you do have to sign up for a private beta invitation. I got my invitation within 24 hours.

Applications for Education
Wetoku is a simple video conferencing service that doesn’t require you to install any software. This is an advantage if you work in a school that doesn’t allow you to install conferencing software like Skype. The other potential advantage of Wetoku is that all calls are automatically recorded which is an advantage when compared to Skype.

Here are some related resources that may be of interest to you:
Connecting Classrooms Through VoiceThread
Present.io – Free Web Conferencing from Drop.io
Stinto – Quickly Create a Free Chat Room