This school year, students around the world are logging into class on The Potter’s School by using a new software, GatherPlace. This month, The Cracked Pot had the opportunity to interview the director of TPS, Mr. Jeff Gilbert, about this new software.

GatherPlace is entirely new software to The Potter’s School, and it is, according to Mr. Gilbert, “a more powerful and more flexible paradigm for conferencing [than Click to Meet].”  GatherPlace enables teachers to share a portion of their desktop, as opposed to only being able to share web pages and Office documents. “The GatherPlace software takes advantage of a refined image compression process that allows screen sharing to be performed over very low bandwidth connections,” said Mr. Gilbert. "It also integrates highly compressed audio, making it possible to use this new approach even over dial-up connections to remote locations ... This allows us to serve more families who are serving in places where they dearly need resources like TPS.”

“The GatherPlace software is more efficient than other conference software because it runs as a native application rather than requiring other components (like the browser) to be working a certain way, or even to be working at all,” Mr. Gilbert continued. “And it is optimized for rapid connection and for staying connected even in adverse network conditions.”

The new software was “the most effective way [the Gilberts] found to increase capability, reliability, and flexibility.” GatherPlace allows The Potter’s School to “have features added, bugs fixed, and even single student problems addressed…at a rate we have never seen before.” Several features suggested by teachers have already been added to the classrooms, and some ideas suggested by families are being considered. “Keep those ideas coming!” Mr. Gilbert added.

Mr. Gilbert explained some of the difficulties that accompany GatherPlace. “Our biggest challenge so far has been that we are the first large-scale deployment of the software, so GatherWorks had to learn new things and make more adjustments during the first weeks, and we even had to get some new equipment we didn't expect to need, to accommodate the large scale.” Despite these problems, the server ‘trouble rate’ has been around average compared to the past eight years, and “the trouble rate after startup has been significantly lower -- perhaps phenomenally so -- than ever before.” Mr. Gilbert said, “At this point we have very few ongoing tech issues, as compared to any previous year, where we always had a small but steady stream of client PC issues to resolve.”

When asked if there were any significant differences between the old software (Click to Meet) and GatherPlace, Mr. Gilbert assured families there are virtually none. “From a features perspective,” he said, “there is almost nothing the new software can't do that the CTM software could do, and of those things it can't do (the main one we know of so far is allowing presented files to be passed to students), we have a plan for having the desired features added in pretty quickly. More important, there is already much it can do (like presenting any document or application, or granting of a teacher's application to another student), and still operate more reliably and more efficiently, that the [Click to Meet] software couldn't do at all.

“The new GatherPlace software is here to stay, and now it is just a matter of getting the audio tuned and new features continually added to meet present and future needs.”

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