Skype Conference calls

I am blown away by the quality of Skype's VoIP service. Not only is the voice quality amazing when using Skype for one to one calls, Skype has an incrediblely useful "conference call" feature that allows up to five people to join a conference call.

We used Skype for the voice portion of a recent webex driven small virtual class, three students and one instructor. Everything worked fine until a last minute, fourth student, joined the conference call. We could not seem to keep the conference bridge operational with a total of five users and ended up having to switch back to a PSTN conference call using another great service, Freeconference.com.

Regardless of the five person setback, Skype conference VoIP calls offer the chance to further build a "real" virtual classroom.