Sometimes It Pays to Pay - Or When a Webinar Crashes to a Halt

Much of my online reputation is built on free technology for teachers. That said, there are services I do pay to use because I've not found other options that are as good. Case in point, I pay $200 per month to license GoToWebinar because I've never found anything to be as reliable. In almost ten years of using it for hundreds of live events, it has only failed me twice. Which is why I feel a little foolish for trying a different service for a free webinar that I hosted yesterday. That other service failed miserably during the webinar that I ran yesterday. I'm going to run the webinar again tomorrow, but it will be back on GoToWebinar where I know all of the functions I need will work reliably.

The last 18 months have been pretty lean around here so I've been looking for ways to cut costs. One of the ways that I thought I could do that was by trying another webinar service. My GoToWebinar subscription and my ConvertKit subscription (the service I use for email mailing lists) are the biggest costs of keeping Free Technology for Teachers and Practical Ed Tech running. The service that I tried yesterday offered a free trial and was 75% cheaper than GoToWebinar on a monthly basis. It even had slick templates for making registration pages! Lesson learned, again, sometimes what looks good and cheap is just cheap.

If you were in yesterday's live webinar, Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support, thank you for putting up with the clunkiness and the screen sharing not working. If you were waiting to see the recording, it came out so poorly that I'm not going to distribute it. I'm going to host Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support again tomorrow at 1pm ET. It will be run through GoToWebinar. You can register here. A recording will be available afterwards.