Category Archives: Videoconferencing

Around the World: Misconceptions Resolved

This afternoon Coloma Middle School, one of our RUS grant schools, is participating in a 3 hour Around the World session with countries in Central and South America. The sessions focus on “misconceptions resolved” as misconceptions are part of the 7th grade language arts curriculum for Coloma.

Costa Rica
Lincoln School, Costa Rica started with a presentation with an overview of their country and their school and daily life. Next they presented their game show to quiz our students on their culture. Many of the questions were taken from their presentation. Some of the questions were:

  • What is the capital of Costa Rica?
  • What is the most popular sport in Costa Rica?
  • What countries neighbor Costa Rica?

Next, our class presented about Coloma, Michigan, and misconceptions about America. They created humorous skits about the misconceptions. We started the game show, and then ran out of time. Clearly, though the students were having a great time!

Nicaragua
Soon the American Nicaraguan School connected and we checked audio and video. Their students weren’t quite ready, so we played the “small town America” game for a few more minutes.

Then Nicaragua shared their humorous skits about misconceptions about Nicaragua. They were video clips liked the ones from Coloma. Both sets of video clips were a little hard to understand due to soft voices and background noise. We certainly learned a few lessons with those skits!

Then we played a Jeopardy game about Nicaragua Physical Geography, History and Culture, and Human Geography. We rotated between American and Costa Rica to compete in the game. Questions included the largest lake, types of food, etc. We just finished the Nicaragua game show in time.

We took a 20 min break for our Michigan students to eat since it was 5:00 p.m. here.

Guatemala
Soon Guatemala connected in. We started with quick intros from the participating classes, and then they started their presentation. They showed many pictures. Then we played their jeopardy game with American and Nicaragua competing. Guatemala had trouble with their skit video clips, so we played the jeopardy game about rural America with Nicaragua and Guatemala competing. This was a really fun format and the students in each class were really involved.

Finally at the end, we were able to watch the skits from Guatemala with misconceptions about their country.

Lessons Learned
We learned again that it’s important to slow down and speak clearly! It’s so easy to get excited and talk so fast! Laughing while talking makes it even harder to understand. We also had trouble with all of the video clips for the skits. They were very difficult to hear. We’ll have to think more about what could make these work better! I think that video clips probably can’t work unless there is a mic on the presentation. In a live skit, you can have the students come closer to the mic and speak slower. However in a taped skit, it’s hard to make it easier to hear.

Due to a comedy of scheduling problems, we didn’t connect to a country every hour for 12 hours as we originally planned. However we had a great connection with these three schools. We appreciate the hard work from all the students who participated in this set of videoconferences!

KC3: Kids Creating Content

USDLA: KC3 by Jan Zanetis

Showing the Stamford High School programs…

History of KC3 – Jan’s conversation with Alan November inspired it the start of the program.

15 schools signed up to create content; 100 schools indicated interested in being the test audiences for the contest.

The classes signed up and the KC3 team worked with them to prepare their presentations for the contest.

Then they did the program with a test audience and it was recorded on a TANDBERG Content Server in TN. The judges then accessed the programs afterwards and completed an online rubric to judge the program.

The project has snowballed where the classes are presenting their programs to other classes, and even generating additional projects and videoconferences with each other.

There were some great little clips of the students. It’s always fun to see kids present. We all laughed and enjoyed the students’ creativity!

Another clip showed the Q&A after the field trip was over. The classes brainstormed other VCs they could do with each other and what else they could teach each other about their communities. These are the same kind of amazing conversations that happen after Read Around the Planet and similar events.

In preparing their presentations, the students addressed a lot of NETS standards.

Jan has a pyramid of VC with distance classes at the bottom, then accessing content providers, then collaborative student projects, and at the top content creation in the classroom.

Comment from a student – “I didn’t realize that teaching was so hard.” That’s a great quote!!

The teachers said that it was hard work, but that the level of student engagement was incredible. Students had to dig deeper to really understand the in depth content to share it with the other class.

The teachers also said it was really eye-opening to see their students present the content – they saw their students engaging with the content at a different level than they usually see.

Don't Make Me Collaborate

USDLA Session: Don’t Make Me Collaborate by Kat Bailey and Samantha Penney

Some snippets from this session…

A lot of 30 second ideas of things you can do with your cell phone. What can you learn or do in 30 seconds…. well some of them you could post in 30 seconds, but if you were going to think reflectively about them, you couldn’t do it in 30 seconds.

Wikinomics by Tapscott covers these areas:

  • sharing
  • acting globally
  • openness
  • peering

Collaborative culture

  • ceding some control
  • sharing responsibility
  • embracing transparency
  • managing conflict
  • projects take on a life of their own

These are described in this session in the context of teaching online – letting your students experience a collaborative culture. Suggestions for managing group learning online like having student contracts for their work in it.

Vision of Students Today – digital ethnography. When I searched that, there’s a K-12 version of it. Did you know? I’m surprised how many of the participants here haven’t seen this video. Does that mean I’m going to too many conferences?? or reading too many blogs?

Suggestions include – create an infrastructure for collaboration in your class. I think this is what Jazz does – creates an infrastructure for collaboration. I can think of some other groups I’m in where we use collaborative tools to create the infrastructure for collaboration.

The conversations about cell phones at this conference is really intriguing. There was a Marc Prensky quote about learning anything on a cell phone.

There were some hints at constructivist learning – “leave out the piece you want the students to learn” and let them find it.

It seems like the new “must have” for conference presenters is a clip from YouTube. Hmm. There was a cool one with flowers and poetry that was a sample of student work.

Reference to Classroom20Wiki – with a recommendation of using these ideas in the classroom. It’s really about integrating technology in the curriculum, but with a Web 2.0 twist, a distance learning twist, and focusing on higher ed classrooms. Interesting perspective

Engaging your “waiting collaborators”: use the collaborative tools to create surmountable challenges and let them have fun with it.

I think we’re doing well with using the Web 2.0 tools to support our collaborative projects, as well as training such as Jazz. How are you using collaborative tools to support your work?

Reading Around the Planet with Wales

One of my schools had conflicts with the scheduled Read Around the Planet dates this year, so I helped them find partners later in March. Our first connections were this week, and more are scheduled next week.

Today’s session is one of three that we scheduled with Wales. We’ve been working on several collaborations with Wales.

Our class is first grade, and their students are close to the equivalent to 3rd and 4th grade students.

08-03-14wales.jpgOur class started with a song about sounds and words that have those sounds. Then the students shared a story called Lazy Mary. The class read the story together and two students acted it out.

The class in Wales had different groups talk about various components of Welsh culture.

Their students asked our students, “Where is Wales?” our kids said, England! One of the things that I’ve learned as we do more connections with the United Kingdom is that there is a perception in the U.S. that the UK is the same as England. Whereas people from Wales and Scotland really don’t appreciate that! I’m not sure that this misconception actually got cleared up in the session today. I don’t know what it would take to clear this up, but I think probably when we connect to schools in Wales and Scotland we need a map and an explanation of where England is compared to where they are. When I first started to understand this confusion, I had to look it up online to get a grasp of the situation. It’s certainly confusing on this side of the Atlantic!

Here are some examples of the questions the students asked each other.

  • 08-03-14wales2.jpgAre you actually by Lake Michigan?
  • What is the weather there?
  • What time is it there?
  • Do you have uniforms?
  • What subjects do you learn?
  • How many students are in your school?
  • What’s the coolest thing about your culture?
  • What TV shows and movies do you like? Simpsons and SpongeBob on both sides of the Atlantic!
  • What kinds of foods do you eat?

It was a great connection and hopefully we’ll continue our collaboration with Wales.

Interviewing World War II Veterans

08-03-13veterans1.jpgThis afternoon I spent another hour with our World War II veterans and three classes as part of our Lest We Forget series. While we get less questions in with a panel format, I think the varied perspective from the different branches of the military, as well as both the Pacific and European fronts, provides a broader understanding to our students. I also like the interaction among the veterans as they share their stories. I think the pictures I captured today give you a little of the idea.

Here’s a sampling of the questions from the students today:

  • What was your first day in the service like?
  • 08-03-13veterans2.jpgI’ve read a lot about General Patton. I know many men admired him. How did you feel about him and the men you served under?
  • Before Pearl Harbor we were neutral. Do you think we should have gotten involved earlier? This was a misconception that our veterans clarified for the students. One of our veterans helped prepare supplies for the war before Pearl Harbor.
  • Do you think we were prepared for the war when we entered it?
  • I’m sure you were sad when your friends were dying. How did you feel when your enemies were dying?
  • What was your reaction when you heard about Germany’s surrender?
  • What was your favorite part of the service? Coming home! You should have seen them all light up with smiles at this question!
  • What weapon do you think was the most influential in the war?
  • Do you think the film Pearl Harbor is historically accurate?
  • What were the living conditions like during the war? One of our veterans has a story of how the kangaroos knocked over their tents at night in Australia.
  • What kept you going through the war?

Each session with our World War II veterans is more poignant than the last. After the session, we reminisced about one of the panel members who is no longer with us. It was hard to say goodbye, wondering who would be missing at our next session in December. Yet they appreciate the opportunity, and so do the students. It’s so important to keep telling these stories. The veterans are grateful for young people’s interest in history.

Reading with New York

Note: This post was written for the MACUL conference blog 2008 with attendees in mind. However I’m reposting it here because it seems it would be useful for readers here too.

Session: Collaborations Around the Planet: Social Networking for Educational Videoconferencing

In my session today, we started with two connections to New York State. Unfortunately, since I was presenting, I couldn’t grab any pictures. But those kids were so cute! The first class presented the animal riddles. Each first grader had a 3-4 sentence riddle about an animal. The teachers guessed the animals. The teachers loved it and it was a great model of how to get the audience involved in your presentation.

In the second connection, the students presented a skit based on the book Andrew’s Loose Tooth. Most of the students took turns narrating, and other students acted out the story. After both presentations, the teachers and students asked each other questions. “How many snow days have you had?” “What do you like about videoconferencing?” “Where are you?” etc.

These connections were illustrations of the project Read Around the Planet. We were also able to compare a 384K videoconference (standard definition) with an HD (high definition) 2M connection from Polycom HDX to HDX. We saw an obvious difference in the clarity. We still got some packet loss and pixelation, but we’re pretty sure the conference didn’t give us QoS on our connection so it was probably on this end.

Afterwards, we talked about how to get videoconferencing going, participating in Michigan Week Connections, how to use the Collaborations Around the Planet website, and shared stories of other videoconferences we’ve done.

ASK Author: The Ultimate Gift

This afternoon we have several classes participating in two sessions of ASK with author Jim Stovall on his book The Ultimate Gift. The students have prepared using the ASK process. This program is one of the Polycom Special Events, with bridging provided by Arnie Comer at Macomb ISD. The depth of questions and interaction is always incredible. Here’s a sample of the questions:

  • It seemed like Jason was blind to all the gifts he had. Did you do that on purpose?
  • Since it’s voting day in Texas, if you were president, how would you bring the gifts to the White House?
  • If you had one day left, what would you do?
  • How did you figure out the top twelve books in your book?
  • What is the worst problem you ever had and what did you learn from it?
  • Has being blind made any part of your life easier?

After the first session, I talked to one of our teachers who was SOOOO excited about the videoconference. She totally loved it! She said that her students thought Mr. Stovall was so nice and easy to talk to. In addition, she said the book and interview made a significant impact on the “troublemakers” in her class. They loved the book!

Polycom has offered this program every year for the last couple years, and probably will continue to do so. So watch their website for registration details. They have openings in other similar programs too.

Daylight Savings Time and the UK

Daylight savings time changes on Sunday in the U.S.! Did you remember?

It doesn’t affect our connections with Canada, because they switch at the same time we do. But it does affect connections with the UK (and Arizona). I have three with the UK that I have to adjust because I forgot (AGAIN!).

Life was a lot easier “way back when” we switched to daylight savings time at the same time as the UK! What was Congress thinking??!!

Yet another little detail that I have to keep paying attention too!!! How are you handling time zone changes these days?

Inventors from the Past

08-03-03inventors.jpgThis afternoon, students from Calvin Britain Elementary, Benton Harbor, are doing their first videoconference and presenting a series of skits and songs for other students in our county. The focus is on Black inventors from the past, particularly those from the 20th century.

After a welcome from the principal, the students sang Lift Every Voice.

Next, the students performed a skit showing what life would be like if there were no Black people in the world. Each part of the day featured missing everyday items like the iron, the clothes dryer, the lawn mower, the auto gear-shift, the pencil sharpener, and the traffic light that were invented by African-Americans.

08-03-03inventors2.jpgThe students then all sang the song, We Shall Overcome, including actions to the song.

After this, the students gave some clues about some famous African-Americans in the form of “I am” statements. The listening students tried to guess the person.

This program was originally scheduled for the end of February, but a snow day made us reschedule for today.

The lesson for this interaction is posted online.

Mushing News from Bering Straits School District

08-03-03iditaproject.jpgThis week and next we have several schools participating in the IditaProject from Bering Straits School District. There are 30 schools participating this year, so the interaction is by emailed in questions instead of live interaction.

We learned about the stats on the race so far, looked at a map of where the race goes, and heard about the snow conditions. We watched some video clips where the students from BSSD had interviewed mushers and edited and produced the tape.

We got to see a surprise guest – Gary Paulsen! He told stories about the race and answered questions from students. He told about his first race and how he was sure, the whole race through, that he wouldn’t finish. And he finished 42nd!

A lot of the discussion in today’s program was about the difference between racing many years ago and now. The GPS units are especially controversial. The mushers aren’t supposed to use GPS to follow the trail – they are supposed to use a compass. And many of them have their favorite places to stop and rest, and other secret strategies. Having a GPS record it is very frustrating. Most of the mushers don’t like it. It was a very interesting discussion.

We’ll be back for the sessions on the 11th, 12th, and 13th. If you’re not an interactive site, you can still follow the streaming video and the discussion forums.