ASK: The Breadwinner

Today students from Niles High School are interviewing Deborah Ellis, a Canadian author writing about tough international issues such as AIDS, poverty and war. The students read the book The Breadwinner, and followed the ASK process to prepare questions for the videoconference. Other books include: Parvana’s Journey, Mud City, Looking for X, The Heaven Shop, Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak, A Company of Fools.

Ms. Ellis shared with the students what Afghan food is like, what it’s like to live in an orphanage, and stories of her experiences in Afghanistan & how they were built into the story.

Some intriguing questions:

  • Did you ever want to give up on writing and what did you do?
  • Why does her father call her by a nickname?
  • Did you ever meet someone in Afghanistan who was beaten?
  • Why did you choose not to have Parvana and the window woman meet?
  • If you were to sum up your writing experience in one sentence, what would it be?
  • If you could go back, are there any parts to the book you’d change?
  • Has writing this book impacted you in any way?
  • What would have happened if Parvana’s dad died?
  • What was the most interesting job you saw in Afghanistan?
  • Is Afghanistan really like we see on TV?

A powerful learning experience for our students! It was sobering to hear the plight of women in Afghanistan. Ms. Ellis is a passionate spokesperson for their experiences and I’m sure our students have a broader understanding of the world and a greater compassion for others.

[On a sidenote, sometimes you just have to suffer through announcements and ringing bells in a videoconference. I can’t think of a good solution for that.]

Halloween Slime Time

This morning we’re taking a 1st grade class to the newest Michigan content provider, Ann Arbor Hands On Museum. We’re doing a program called Halloween Slime Time, and the students are talking to Witch Patricia. Today they’ll be making slime in a study on the states of matter.

The museum has some great visuals to explain the states of matter within the context of Halloween, such as gas coming from the cauldron.

Now the students are using pipettes to follow a simple recipe to make two kinds of slime (a polymer). The kids are really enjoying playing with the slime. They say it smells like glue. Witch Patricia encourages the students to investigate the slime and see what it can do. I hear the joy of learning coming from my TV!

The second slime had properties of a solid and a liquid and students used their knowledge of solid & liquid to describe the slime.

Kids really enjoyed the program. Some kids said, “Can we do this again?” and “Can we keep our slime?”

Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum offers programs seasonally. The next opportunity is Critters in the Cold, offered December 1 through March 3. Schedule a program by request during that time frame.

High School Writing

A few of my local high school writing teachers have asked me about videoconference options lately. So here’s a list of options.

Writing/Author Related Content Provider Programs

  • Schooner Christmas: Creative Writing with a Historical Perspective from Pier Wisconsin. Available in November & December.
  • Unity & Diversity from the Cleveland Institute of Music addresses skills for writing.
  • Author/Computer Illustrator Bill Davis is willing to tailor programs for schools. See two of his listed programs for an idea of what he can share with your students.
  • Cooperating School Districts has a set of author programs.
  • Rutgers Camden Center for the Arts has two programs for high school on Poetry and Prose.
  • The Smithsonian American Art Museum has a program on Visual and Language Arts that can be used as a springboard for writing exercises.

Related to that, here are a few literature based high school level programs:

  • Don Quixote, Faust, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Edgar Allan Poe from the Center for Puppetry Arts.
  • Harlem Renaissance from the Cleveland Museum of Art.
  • Several programs are available on various Shakespeare related topics.
  • The Indiana Repertory Theatre has a program on Bringing Dickens’ Characters to Life.
  • The Mid Atlantic Center for the Arts has a program on Victorian Literature that can be tailored to requested author/literature.

Classroom to Classroom Connections
Another option is to consider having your class connect to another class for a celebration of writing. Some ideas include:

  • A poetry fest/poetry jam/coffee house event where students share poetry. This could be done point-to-point with another class, or multipoint and over a lunch period.
  • A story starter session. Classes could present to each other a visual story starter: a picture, a still life pose, a skit or other visual. After sharing the story starters via videoconference, students could write stories and share them for feedback via email, a blog, or an online class discussion space in Moodle or a similar tool.
  • Journalism Club/News Teams. Any writing related clubs or school news teams could meet with a similar club in another school. Students could share what activities their club is involved in, learn from the other club, and brainstorm new ideas together.

These are just a few possibilities. I’m sure you can think of more!

Empower Peace Nov. 10. Participate!

Ran across this in my email a few times. Looks like something you should do!!!! Perfect for Broadcast Clubs and World Issues Classes.
Project “Empower Peace” has been connecting high school youth in the United States with their contemporaries in the Arab and Muslim world for a few years now. This “connection” is made possible through video conferencing and the Internet. To date, nearly 10,000 students from
over twenty countries have participated in or viewed our “virtual” cultural exchanges.
Here’s where we need YOU! Our most recent broadcast was the best to date, on September 29th, hundreds of students in Boston and New York interacted live with hundreds of students from Cairo, Egypt and Islamabad, Pakistan. Additionally, thousands watched the broadcast on
the Internet.
However, a few days later, disaster struck Pakistan in a form of an earthquake…tens of thousands dead, millions homeless…the Empower Peace students in Boston and New York wanted to do something to help their new friends in Islamabad…in an effort to do so, we are
organizing a LIVE TV/INTERNET TELETHON…entitled, “EMPOWER PEACE, PLEDGING FOR PAKISTAN.”
The TV/Internet Telethon will be broadcast live on Thursday, November 10th at 1-2PM (ET) in Boston on WB56-WLVI-TV and will also be streamed over the Internet (empowerpeace.com). Of additional significance, the broadcast will be transmitted by satellite back to Pakistan enabling viewers there to see the telethon.
We need a lot of schools from around the USA to pledge via e-mail….. would like them to pre-register on the empower peace web site http://www.empowerpeace.com we’d like to read their pledge out loud during the broadcast…so let them know they can compose a sentence or
2 to be read….
Also, if at all possible, we would like for your school to produce a high quality video message to youth in Pakistan we will review for airing…message should be no more than :30 in length….
Go to http://www.empowerpeace.com for more information.

High School Graphics Arts Programs

On Monday I talked to our Graphic Arts CTE (Career Technical Education) program teachers. We brainstormed some possibilities for their classes. Here’s what we came up with.

  1. Animation: Not Just for Saturday Morning, from the Museum of TV & Radio.
  2. Programs from Author/Computer Illustrator Bill Dallas Lewis. I think this is a really good option because Bill is willing to tailor the programs to what the teacher is looking for. He can do Photoshop, Flash, and more. Visit his website for more details as well. BTW, he does web cam videoconferencing too. He can guide a project as well.
  3. Students could create computer generated art to share with another class for feedback and review.
  4. Finally I shared my notes from the Keystone Conference session: The Orange County Animation Project: Mentoring From The Real World.

A Receptionist Via VC?

Quoted by Ian Jukes in his blog,

A Pakistani company, The Resource Group, seeking more call-center work from U.S. firms, set up an office this year in Washington, D.C., a block from the White House, and installed a receptionist, live from Karachi, via a flat-screen TV on the office wall. According to a May Washington Post report, Ms. Saadia Musa cheerily greets visitors, answers and routes phone calls to the Washington office, lets in deliverymen, and orders sandwiches from down the street. [Washington Post, 5-10-05]

Another intriguing business use of videoconferencing! Who would have thought of that? Now what are the implications for K12 VC in this little story?

One-on-One with Teachers

Today I met with our Career Technical Education (CTE) teacher advisory groups from around the county. They were participating in a professional development day and had an hour to work in groups. I floated from group to group to talk about what they could do with videoconferencing.

It was very interesting. Most of them are interested in using VC, but there aren’t any “ready made” programs in their area: marketing, business, advertising, computer graphic arts, building trades, public safety, firefighting, EMT, etc. So we talked about guest speakers. I asked them if you could bring any expert in your field to your teachers, who would it be? We made lists of ideas to work on.

We also talked about project connections with other classes. One of the more intriguing ideas we came up with is for the building trades class. We’re talking about our class locally sharing a video clip of a field trip to an local historical building, interesting for its construction. Then we’d share that with another building trades class in a different area who was also studying about a local interesting building. We hope to make this happen in May. It’s a morning class, so we’d need a partner school in EST or CST time zone. If any of you reading this blog have an interested class, send me an email. We’ll probably be working out the details in April.

This confirms what I’ve been thinking this year about my local teachers use of videoconferencing. They know what VC is and what it can do, but they really need someone to talk to them one-on-one or in small subject area groups to assist them in selecting or creating a videoconference opportunity for their curriculum.

Balancing the Federal Budget

This morning Coloma High School students are balancing the federal budget! Actually they are participating in Exercise in Hard Choices, a simulation that helps students understand the federal budget process. We’re connected with the University of Akron, Ohio, who is facilitating the videoconference, and a class in Decatur and Midland, Michigan.

The program started with an overview of budgeting, at a student level, state level, and federal level. Additional graphs helped students compare U.S. federal spending with other countries.

Student groups start by setting a budget goal of when (and if) they want to balance the federal budget. Each group is diverse with different viewpoints so that students experience the process of negotiation that occurs at the federal level. Then students make choices on 8 main areas: National Security, Income Support, General Government, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance, Health Insurance Coverage, and Revenues. Students enter their choices into an electronic scorecard that shows the longterm consequences of their decisions.

After they have deliberated and made their choices, the facilitator asked the students to share where their hot topics were and what issues came up as they debated. Students shared stories from people they knew and how the budget decisions affected those stories/experiences. Students clearly were engaged in the discussion and considered the country’s choices. Great experience!

Nobody Likes Me: Bats

This morning we have a Kindergarten class from Hollywood Elementary connecting to the Cincinnati Zoo to learn about bats. Ken was kind enough to tailor his Nobody Likes Me session to just the bats part of the program.

It’s so fun to see to the awe on the kids’ faces when they hear a voice and just see a logo on a document camera. They get so quiet!

Ken, as always, does a great job of getting the kids talking and interacting from the very first of the videoconference.

Today the kindergarten kids saw bats in the Cincinnati Zoo, answered questions, practiced flying like bats, and learned all about bats! We ended with questions from the students. They have been studying bats, so they had good questions ready. Why do bats hang upside down? Do bats go to school to learn to fly? How high can a bat fly?

The students are building a bat house on Friday, so the teacher asked Ken for advice on where to put the bat house.

Ken was really sensitive to the attention span of kindergarteners and worked with the teachers even during the program to make sure the length and discussion covered what they wanted to learn.