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https://anchor.fm/hitechpod/embed/episodes/82--The-Roastery-Big-Publishers--Topia-io-e1rd6lb
TopiaTopia is a virtual environment that allows you to create a basic avatar, then use that avatar to walk around and collaborate with people remotely. It is essentially a video conference tool with virtual environments. It is a lot like Gather.town, which we talked about back in Episode 35. Within Topia you can walk around the digital room or building you create and talk 1:1 in small rooms or tables, or even hold bigger meetings/conferences.
To really get a feel for how Topia works check out their great overview video below:
Also note if you want you can easily enter public Topia worlds here to test it out for yourself.
Topia has a ton of great uses, but when it comes to education we specifically think a tool like this would be great for creating a virtual classroom to hold live sessions with students, a virtual office to hold office hours, or you could even create a virtual study room for your students.
Another use for those of us in professional development is virtual conferences. Topia is a great solution for creating a virtual event for people to engage in.
While in Topia you can of course use the tool do all the normal video conferencing things you do in Zoom or Teams. You can chat, share your screen, and collaborate on a whiteboard. The tool even integrates with Miro (which we talked about in Ep 62) and Padlet. The advantage with Topia though is this is all done in an actual environment that you can create to have tables, rooms, and more.
The one disadvantage with Topia is the pricing model. They have a free demo mode, but it only allows for 10 people to be in the room you create. This can work though for you to test out the tool and for those with small classes. So we recommend creating a free account to test Topia first and if you like look into upgrading to the payed models.
If you need help getting started, we recommend following Topia’s Getting Started Guide.