Fighting with computers

After my first on-line lecture I have got some interesting feedback from my students and from my own experience too. While it felt odd during the first few minutes, the fact I saw many of my students were there and that setup mostly worked made me relax a bit more during the second half of the class. But, first of all, let me tell you what worked well and what did not: Asking the students to post a comment for attendance record worked extremely well in my opinion. As it allowed me to put faces to the online viewers counter, while it also reassured me my students were ready, which also relaxed me as I was worried they might not show up. Comments allowed students to report audio trouble when it happened and me fixing it quickly.  Of course, comments also allowed students to raise questions about the topics I was talking about, which make the lecture a bit more interactive and, hopefully, useful and entertaining. I found myself at times uneasy as I have not a pointer to signal on

The coronavirus crisis forced us all to stay home. Those of us in the education business are instructed to keep going using online resources. But given the current state of laws, I am reluctant to distribute any personal information (and that includes emails) to any available webinar platform. Several of them have been suggested like GoToMeeting or Zoom by my friends. We have Microsoft's Teams on-campus package but, for some reason not all my students are on the platform. So it appears the simplest thing to do is to just use youtube streaming service, that allows hidden videos/streams, only accessible to those who know the URL. And I could email the stream info to my students by email without revealing their email information to anyone. So that sounds like a plan but ... there are a few caveats: While I do know how to stream a video out of a webcam (as simple as pressing the upload button and choosing "Go live"), just the idea of a talking head does not seem very a