Singing Across America

10 Read Across America connections today. They all worked!!!

I didn’t get to watch them all, as I’m letting go and letting my districts connect on their own whenever possible. But I saw several and what stood out today was the singing!

At least four classes shared songs today: School songs, Suess songs, even a water cycle song from a class in Texas. Some classes had actions to go with the songs, others stood in a group to sing. The songs added a fun and celebratory element to the presentations.

Andrea Israeli and I had a conversation today about whether or not we should do these all stacked together in a few days. It’s exhausting for distance learning coordinators making it all happen. But it’s such a celebration of reading and videoconferencing. We decided it’s worth all the work. It gets teachers participating in VC who often wouldn’t get around to it otherwise. In schools where several classes participate, the teachers participate in a shared experience and compare what they learned and experienced in the connections. This increases the buzz for videoconferencing and increases the enthusiasm all round. Is this true for you too?

25 down, 13 to go.

RAA Day Two

12 videoconferences today: 10 RAA, 1 field trip, and 1 statewide videoconference on the MEAP test, our state test. 3 connections didn’t happen, 1 due to the teachers involved rescheduling, 2 due to snow/ice storms in Pennsylvania.

Here’s a few lessons and observations from today’s VCs.

1. Friends are awesome! I had trouble with my first connection at 7:30 this morning and ended up begging bridging from my VC colleague Arnie Comer, at Macomb ISD. Having someone to call when you’re desperate is really helpful!

2. It’s time to let go. I had trouble with two RAA calls yesterday that I tried to bridge on my Polycom VSX7000. Ended up that they worked much better when my school connected directly. This fits well with what I’ve noticed about IP calls – the fewer things – bridges, gateways, firewalls, – that are in between the endpoints, the better the connection works. So it’s time for me to let go of watching all my connections and start letting my districts connect on their own. Hard to let go. I love to watch these! And blog about them! But it’s necessary to let go as our programming and usage grows by leaps and bounds.

3. Switched calls to the UK. I helped out a colleague, Dan Finnigan, at Saginaw ISD with their RAA test call with the United Kingdom. They were connecting to a switched ISDN site. I knew it needed to be switched, but I don’t have ISDN connected directly to an endpoint so I didn’t know how to make it work. Dan figured out that the call types in the settings had to include 2×56 and 2×64. Once that was checked, when setting up a call you can enter the number two times after selecting the correct switched speed.

4. Comic Relief during Stressful Moments. Since the TWICE-organized Read Across America celebration started in 2001, I’ve worn a full Cat in the Hat suit for our RAA connections. My philosophy is, it gives the students something fun to look at if their connection doesn’t work. And sometimes I end up being the audience for their presentation when the partner school can’t connect. Today a colleague gave me whiskers and a cat nose too. Sometimes you have to be creative to really enjoy all the connections!

5. High school level poetry makes fascinating listening. Only 27 of the 1042 Read Across America connections were high school classes. Several of them connected to my classes and most of them shared student written poetry. Having the audience class give comments and feedback on the poetry enhances this type of exchange even more.

6. What’s the weather? Every VC, with every age, includes a conversation about the weather! We connected with a class in Texas today that had 94 degrees yesterday. Here, 28 degrees and snow. That conversation and comparison always comes up. It’s important, I think! It helps everyone feel connected.

7. Don’t put VC equipment in the computer lab.  This picture shows a class we connected to that had their videoconference equipment in the computer lab. Notice how the computers get in the way and you can hardly see the students. There isn’t a good place to have the students present and hardly any room to set up the display board you can see on the far right. Something to consider with new installations.
15 RAAs down, 23 to go.

My Favorite Things

The first day of our Read Across America connections went fairly well. 7 out of 8 connections actually occurred. We had several glitches along the way, but we made it!

Here are a few of my favorite things from today.

  • Hats! Visuals are crucial in a medium like this! Many classes of course are celebrating Dr. Seuss and have Cat in the Hat hats. But we enjoyed the cowboy hats from our Texas partner school too!
  • Young students sharing work: posters, pictures, stories, poems. They are so cute!
  • Props! A class from Frazer Elementary class in Ohio had a wonderful castle, costumes and more to go with their story.
  • Pictures and stories. So many great stories, books, and pictures shared in the programs today!
  • Questions. From a kindergartener: Do you guys do math? And from Texas: What is the weather in Michigan today?

7 down. 31 more to go.

A wireless "document camera"

Today in a MysteryQuest presentation, I saw the most creative “document camera” I’ve seen yet! A class from Kenosha Wisconsin shared their clues in a “PowerPoint like” presentation. I suspect it wasn’t PowerPoint since it was on a Mac. And they had set a camera preset on their laptop screen. Amazingly, it came through very clear (as shown).

Wireless document camera! 🙂 Who would have thought of that?!

Ok, I know, you can’t present documents on it, but it worked great for their MysteryQuest presentation!

On another note, this was the last MysteryQuest World session for this year. Soon I’ll have dates online for the April MysteryQuest USA (5th grade) events.

H.261, H.263, H.264 La La Land

Is anyone other than me have a weird year with video protocols? It used to be that you just had to think about… is this call H.323 (IP) or H.320 (ISDN)? and connect accordingly. Now sometimes two video protocols (H.261, 263, 264) get in a call and have a fight with each other!

This year so far I’ve several strange things happening with calls with both Polycom and Tandberg units that can do H.261, H.263 and/or H.264. This morning I was troubleshooting a call with Andrea Israeli, NY and a ClicktoMeet site for Read Across America. Andrea and I have identical Polycom VSX7000’s on the same software rev and the ClicktoMeet site could call me but they couldn’t call her. Very strange. On a hunch, I suggested forcing the call down to H.261. Voila! It worked.

I feel like I’ve been sucked into 261/263/264 la la land. It’s a land where you never know if your calls will work. But it seems that forcing the call down to H.261 makes it work. Why is that???

I love the idea of H.264 working on low bandwidth sites with better quality. Another of my Read Across America connections is with a class in Alberta who called us at 128K. The quality was beautiful! Polycom People Plus Content came across great as well. I’d really like to see this work on a consistent basis. I guess we just have to weather this bump as the vendors work it out.

Crossing my fingers for 32 mostly Read Across America connections this week….

Great Backgrounds & Posters

Another MysteryQuest day. One of the best presentations today came from Wessendorf Middle School, Texas. I loved their use of backgrounds in their news show. Look at the artwork on the left and the wonderful wall map on the right. These add visual interest to the presentation.
 

This class also had posters that worked! It’s usually pretty hard to make posters clear enough. Here’s an example that worked really well. Note the huge letters and small amount of information on one poster. This made note taking much easier.

Troy Intermediate, Avon Lake, Ohio, also had a news show. My favorite part was a little advertisement from the Fruity Fruit Store, sharing a clue about local products and services.

On a side note, the Polycom mics are really good! During one news show, the announcers were whispering to each other and calling up the next students. We heard it. 🙂 And we almost always hear the whispers of “louder, louder” to the person who is presenting the clue. Just some of the fun quirks of MysteryQuest sessions!

The Greatest Generation

Today six classes from Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, and Virginia interviewed local World War II veterans in our Lest We Forget ASK program.

It was a wonderful experience. We started each session with introductions from each of the veterans participating in that session. Then Betty Bennett, who was part of the code-breakers, shared her experience and gave the students a code to work on. At the end we revealed the answer. Only one of the schools actually broke the code!
For most of the session we rotated through the participating schools taking two questions from each site. Between the two questions the veterans sharedpictures they had brought in such as the one shown.
Here is a sampling of the questions:

  • Were you ever afraid?
  • How did you feel about fighting in the war?
  • If you were given a chance, would you serve again?
  • What did you miss most overseas and why?
  • What was life like when you returned?
  • What feeling did you have knowing that you made it out just before the attack in Pearl Harbor?
  • We know that being in the war was tough place to be, but did you have any fond memories?
  • Did you ever feel that you were also fighting the war for a moral reason besides fighting for our country?
  • What was your mind on while you were fighting?
  • What was the scariest thing that happened when you were in the war?
  • How were you treated in the countries in which you were fighting?
  • Did any of you ever save the life of another soldier?

In the first session, the 112 students from Methacton High School gave our veterans a standing ovation. My eyes misted in that proud moment. As I told our veterans, they are an incredibly valuable primary source for students learning about our wars and understanding the contributions of our fathers and grandfathers to our freedom.

Keeping Organized

Organizational skills are probably the most essential skills needed for a distance learning coordinator at any level. Do you agree?

There are so many details to keep track of! Program requests from the teachers, scheduling procedures for each place you want to connect with, IP addresses or ISDN numbers, trouble numbers, dates & times, etc.

I’d like to share some of my tips & tricks for keeping organized. How do you keep track of your distance learning connections? Please comment and share!

Scheduling & Program Requests
The first area to organize is the requests from teachers. I started using FileMaker Pro very early on in our distance learning program to take teacher requests. Every request is a record in our database. Mostly I require the teachers to fill it out, but sometimes under special circumstances I do it for them. There are two forms that enter requests into the same database: Scheduling Request and Mini-Grant Request. I’m linking so you can see how they work.

This way, when a request comes in, I get all the information up front needed to schedule with a content provider or for a project or special event.

Then we have a back end entry (which I won’t give you access to! :>) where my scheduler and I keep track of our communications in scheduling the event. We record when we fill out the online form, summaries of emails/calls between us and the provider and/or the teacher, etc. This way we can quickly see the status of any request.
When the program is all scheduled, then a confirmation email goes to the teacher, the distance learning contacts in the building/district, and the principal.
Right now we are doing scheduling for all our districts. Originally with our V.35 network, they couldn’t connect on their own so they had to schedule through me. Now there is the possibility of them scheduling on their own, but usually I am funding part or all of the program, so I still need the records. So at this point, scheduling still all goes through me. As we expand, we may need to rethink this procedure. We have been doing about 200 or so programs a year. I’m already over that number this year, and next year we’re installing 35 new units (above the 24 we support right now).

Projects & Special Events
Another area that really takes organizational skills is running projects and special events such as ASK, MysteryQuest, Lest We Forget, and Read Across America. I use a trick I learned from Arnie Comer at Macomb ISD: Word tables. For example, the picture shows my Word file for my 38 Read Across America connections. Orange boxes are ISDN; light green are test calls scheduled; and darker green are completed test calls. Each row is a connection; each box is the contact information from the match email for both partners.

I keep Word files like this for the other events we run as well. That way I can easily pull up whatever contact information I need. Thanks Arnie for teaching me this trick!

RSS Calendar
I keep all the events on my own calendar (Palm Desktop), but this year I’ve tried, with imperfect success, to keep the events listed on our website as well using RSS Calendar. I learned about this tool from Dan Gross, SWING, Wisconsin. I haven’t done too well with keeping it current & accurate, but it has been better than how I used to manually enter our events on our website! I would like to do this better, because as we increase use in districts, my local distance learning coordinators will also need to make sure we don’t double book events within a district.

Email
As some of you razz me about, I tend to generate a lot of email. And of course, the more you send, the more you get! So I have lots of folders, organized within folders. I have a main level folder for content providers, with a folder for each provider within. I have a main level folder for state, province, and country folders of people I know doing VC in different areas. Very handy when planning a project! I also have a folder for each ASK program within an ASK folder, and a folder for projects with a separate folder. This way I can quickly find whatever contact/history I need.

Checklists
Finally, there are some great checklists out there for making a videoconference happen. This one, from Athena, UK, is detailed and easy to understand. See especially the checklist on the last page. Participants in my Kid2Kid online class love this list. Do you know of any other good checklists? Please share!

Please share
These are just a few of my strategies. I’m sure there are many other good ones. Please leave a comment so we can learn from your strategies!

January 19, 2007 Update. I’m no longer using the RSS Calendar. Now I have a way for my districts to enter programs they’ve scheduled onto the calendar, and a way for them to look up what’s scheduled on the calendar. These are all different entry points to the same Filemaker Pro database mentioned above.

Scrapbooking via VC

What’s the craziest way you’ve used videoconferencing? How about cropping (scrapbooking, scrapping) with a friend in another state? Elaine Shuck and I connected with Festoon and Skype on Saturday night for a couple hours to scrapbook together and share ideas. Scott Merrick popped in for a few minutes to see what we were doing. This is a screen shot from Festoon. Elaine was showing her scrapbook while Scott and I admired it.

You can also do this with just Skype as they just added video calls, or with GoogleTalk and Festoon. I like GoogleTalk better for the audio. It’s clearer and the interface is simpler. Also, I read in Wired Magazine a while ago that Skype uses P2P technology and uses bandwidth when you’re not in a call. However, I can’t find the reference online. Should have kept a hard copy. The online technical FAQs for Skype don’t mention this either. So I’m not sure if it’s true or was true and isn’t anymore. If any of you have more information, please correct me by leaving a comment!

I’ve been using these tools for connections, especially for Christmas celebrations, with relatives in Taiwan and Canada. Pretty cool what you can do these days to connect with family and friends far away.

While these tools are great, they aren’t standards based like H.323. You have to have the same software as the person you’re connecting to. And you can’t use these tools to connect to all the content I’m usually writing about here. On the other hand, if you have an international contact without access to videoconferencing, this might be the best way to connect to them.

I’m not ready to recommend PC-based videoconferencing to my districts quite yet. We don’t have the bandwidth yet for multiple connections at will. Most of my districts have only a T-1 and in some it’s pushing the edges of quality to do one 384K videoconference. Some day maybe we’ll be ready for using these tools more often in our schools.

VC Database Updates 2-17-2006

Lately we’ve been updating and checking everything in the BCISD-Polycom VC Program Database. Here are two recent updates.

  • Many of you know one of our favorite providers, the Lake County Waste Management District, lost Rita, the great storyteller, as their distance learning coordinator. Lara Gonzalez, the new person, has been reorganizing and updating their program listing. We just updated ours based on the programs they currently offer. More new programs will be coming out on March 1st. So watch for those as well.
  • Also, a new provider, The Mariners’ Museum, in Newport News, Virginia, is now offering programs nationally. I’m really excited about their programs. Great for history classes! Reasonable cost too, only $50. I hope their other programs for onsite viewing can be converted to distance learning programs too as they look intriguing and excellent.