 Conducting meetings Traditional meetingsYou may allow class time for project meetings, or students may meet outside of class, or both. Traditional project teams who meet outside of class may gather at a library or somebody's home to discuss the project. The secretary may take the minutes of the meeting, type them out, and then photocopy them for each member of the team.
If a member isn't able to attend the meeting due to location or other constraints, they may have to rely on the minutes of the meeting to try to catch up, if the minutes were even taken.
FirstClass is a conference room While FirstClass allows you to schedule and coordinate these meetings, it also provides a means of conducting online meetings. Students can get together at their own computers at the scheduled time to participate, regardless of their location. This makes it easier for project teams to hold meetings, especially when distance, weather, or illness is an issue, and it gives shy students an opportunity to contribute in a less-threatening environment.
A session that is in progress will have a red balloon in the top right hand corner added to the standard icon.
 This is a sample public instant messaging session.
 Students can see who is typing on the Participants tab. If desired, the session can be moderated.
 Students can share files during the session by adding them to or downloading them from the Attachments tab.
 Further, if students wish, they can initiate a meeting with any student at any time if they are both online. This makes it easy to conduct meetings or brainstorm with others at their leisure.
FirstClass is a secretaryThe creator of the instant messaging session can easily save a transcript of the open session right from the Setup tab. It is automatically saved to the creator's Mailbox when the session closes.
 The secretary can edit the file to annotate portions of the meeting, or use it as a basis to summarize the points of the meeting.
Discussion conferencesIf not all of the project members are available at once for an online meeting, they can also have a discussion through a conference. A team member may post questions, comments, information, or anything else that may be brought up at a meeting, and post it to a conference. As other members log in, they can read the posting and reply to it. All of the members can contribute at their own convenience, and each topic is sorted (or "threaded") based on subject.
This is a set of discussions in a conference. They are sorted by thread.
 The next stepNow that students can use FirstClass to schedule and hold meetings, it is time for them to start brainstorming among themselves.
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