Two New VC Articles

Innovate, an online journal, recently published two new articles on videoconferencing. Just added them to the TWICE Bibliography of articles. One from Scott Merrick, who has published many articles on videoconferencing, and another on college/university classes using VC to bring experts to the classroom. Cool that universities are seeing possibilities for VC other than regular classes.

Conversation Brings Compassion

What experiences help students learn to care about the news & what happens in the world?

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know we connected a world issues class and a 2nd grade class to Karachi, Pakistan the end of September.

Now both classes have emailed me wondering how they can send a care package or do something to help their peers in Pakistan affected by the earthquake.

It was just a simple conversation, really, those connections two weeks ago. Yet look at the concern now from these students. All of a sudden they know someone in Pakistan and what a difference it makes! If more students could participate in global videoconferences, maybe they too could learn to care about the world around them & want to make a difference!

Winding Down…

So the Keystone Conference is winding down. I’m spending the next session making sure I’m all set for my presentation. It’s been a great conference and I’ve especially enjoyed the networking. Now I’ll be offline for a few days as I take a complete technology break and attend a cousin’s wedding in Canada. I’m looking forwardto it.

Here’s the links I’ll be sharing as “solution resources” for the issues/problems I’ll be addressing in my session. You might find them useful.

Administrative Issues

Curriculum Issues

Teacher Issues

Animation Mentoring

The Orange County Animation Project: Mentoring From The Real World with Michael Guerena, Program Specialist, Orange County Department of Education (CA, UNITED STATES), Dave Master, Director, ACME Animation, and Don Isbell, Animation Teacher, Century High School.

Dave started by explaining the need for students well trained in animation. When professionals review students’ portfolios, they only keep 1 in 1000 of the portfolios that come in.

He showed a video how how students get feedback from professionals on their work.

They have 3 levels of telecasts:

  1. Audition room for students who are just learning the basics. At this level they have a year’s resources for teachers.
  2. The intern level is for students who are really serious. The students work is evaluated by professionals in the industry.
  3. The apprentice level is the same as in the industry. Students have to have 5 pieces of work that are at the level to get a job.

The pros in the studios just walk down the hall to their videoconference room to evaluate the students’ work.

He showed another clip where the students at the intern level are given an assignment. The students work on it for two weeks, revise, review, and then the professionals critique the students work. Then the students do an informed revision on their work. The teachers in the classes around the US also interacted and learned with the pros through the program.

Their group is now considered a major source of talent by the studios!

They do have room for other schools to join (jr high, high school, & college). The telecasts are a round-robin. They make webcasts available for other classes as well.

How do you participate? Contact Debbie Brooks, 323-334-6191, dbrooks at theacmenetwork.org who is the director of this program.

It’s $1000 a year to participate online or $12,500 for all the telecasts which is about half the cost of what it really costs to do the program.

Here’s the project website.

Next we’re hearing from Michael Guerena, and he’s explaining how they are implementing this project on a county wide basis. The project goals include developing opportunities to showcase student animation work through exhibitions, broadcasting, and the Internet, as well as preparing students for a wide range of animation careers.

They partner with local colleges and also work to develop highly-skilled animation instructors.

It’s incredible really how students interact with professionals and get live feedback on their work. One student shared how good it makes him feel to realize that pros care about giving feedback to them and helping them work with their work.

On a side note, you can really tell that these guys are all into video. They have a great background and really good lighting that makes the presentation really easy to listen to & watch.

Now Don Isbell, Animation Teacher, Century High School, is explaining how the program works in his school. His school is in a high poverty and most of his students haven’t been to a museum or traveled much. This program brings an incredible experience for the poorer students and expands their understanding of the types of jobs open to them and gives more of them the realization that they CAN go to college!

Don shared how his students learned collaboration skills, how to behave professionally interacting with the professionals, and how to mentor each other. In addition, the program raised the literacy levels of students as they had to use technical jargon in communicating about animation.

Neat program! My ideas of what can be done with VC have expanded again!

Strolling Around the Earth Garden with Mike Griffith

Another global session with Mike Griffith. He started off with an email quote with his colleague Atsuku in Japan (not sure I’m spelling her name correctly). She said something to this effect regarding Mike – The world earth is a garden to him. He’s always strolling around the garden freely.

Mike has been doing the Global Leap project since 2000, and has been doing international projects for over 10 years.

He’s talking about a connection with students speaking English and French and how they were really struggling to talk to each other. Mike suggests instead that we show something – for example if you’re discussing soccer/football – bring the ball & show it! Then everyone knows what you’re talking about. And remember that you could take a digital camera out and get footage to share with your class.

Communication. Communication. Communication. Mike has three Tips & Tricks:

  1. Have a signature on your email! (He asked us how many of us have received an email we didn’t know who it was from!).
  2. If you’re working internationally, give the date in full: October 3, not 10/3/05 because not all countries use the same shortcut format.
  3. List your time/my time. Think about where people are and what time of day it is. If you go wider than 6 hours time difference, then the teachers have to be flexible in connecting to each other. Two good sites are TimeandDate.com and TimeZoneConverter.

Mike suggested that using technology to communicate is 4th world (vs. old world, new world, 3rd world). We need to be sensitive to the types of connectivity in other parts of the world in our planning.

He mentioned connections with the Imperial War Museum, an iEARN project, and a conversation between students about genocide.

Mike asks us: Is this important? Is it important to get classes to connect to talk to each other and understand each other? We have the technology that can bring kids to talk to kids & teachers to talk to teachers to help create greater understanding between cultures.

Dr. Stanton, the expert they interviewed in the genocide program said, “if we were all videoconferencing, there’d be no genocide.” Mike added, if we were talking to each other and understanding each other, there’d be no genocide.

Mike emphasized how in doing these connections, not everything needs to be done in the videoconference. Other tools and resources can be used to make the connection more engaging and rich.

Mike also reminded us to set the context. The classes need share pictures of their life with the communication so that we know what it’s like to live in that area.

Kathy Lewis shared a cool project with a class in Taiwan where the Taiwan class posted a newsletter online and then the U.S. class edited the grammar… this way both classes could practice English grammar.

The first link is easy to do – just comparing cultures and saying hello. But what is sustainable and of value? How do we create projects that are more in-depth and have specific curriculum outcomes? I asked, what topics are good to discuss & create projects around that take advantage of the international connection. Mike suggested – addressing stereotypes, learning to respect etiquette in other countries, etc.

This session ended way too soon!!!

VC Standards

A reference everyone should know about is NYIT EEZ & CILC’s Videoconferencing Standards document. This link is to the document on the Keystone Conference handout page. If you’re involved in VC, you should definitely check out these standards & apply them to your program….

What Tree Am I?

Ok here’s the coolest idea I’ve run across in a while….

Bill Johnson from OneNet in Oklahoma just sent this email to the Megaconference listserv:

My H.323 IP address is below, my system is always in “auto-answer” mode
and my remote camera control is enabled. Simply dial my IP with your
system, select remote camera control and pan hard left. You should be
able to see a lite-green tree out side my window. So far, no one has
been able to tell me what kind of tree it is. Can you tell? If so,
please email me. Only a few weeks left to figure this out as the “Fall”
season is upon us and the tree will be bare soon.

Bill Johnson
Director of Network Operations – OneNet
Director – Netrad Infrastructure for CASA
President – Oklahoma Distance Learning Association
Video 164.58.250.185

What a cool idea! Imagine kids making a problem like this & sending it out to many schools to dial in & try to solve! Imagine putting several clues around your classroom & setting a time when other school could dial in and pan the camera remotely around the room….

What curriculum based ideas can you think of???

David Thornburg's Keynote

It’s always fun to hear David Thornburg’s keynote presentations.

One of the first technologies he showed was Skype & Festoon, which we had just discussed in the Global Collaboration Birds of a Feather, so that was pretty cool.

A questions to think about: We spend 13 years on reading & writing. How many years do we spend on media literacy?

He’s talking about places you can find images online. Reminds me of a thought I had last year when listening to a session on visual literacy. The cool thing about connecting to an art museum such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, is you get the visual literacy interpretation and instruction along with the pictures. Whereas it takes more work to put together a lesson using online materials, figure out how to connect it to student learning & curriculum benchmarks and make it an interesting lesson all at once.

He showed several other interesting technologies too….

Including MIT’s new hand crank $100 computer…. which will really change one-to-one computing….

We need that same one-to-one access to videoconferencing. Access in classrooms is certainly what we need to aim for because that’s where the action is!

Collaboration Birds of a Feather

Paul Hieronymus, Lorain County Distance Learning Consortium, is facilitating this session on collaborative projects.

Resources mentioned in the sharing:

Projects people have:

  • Paul is doing “storytime” with teachers who haven’t done a VC before. They read a story for 20 min. and then do some conversation. It’s for k-2 classes. The teachers just have to mute and unmute the mic, and call on kids. Paul reads the story and asks them questions about the book. He uses it as a recruitment tool to get teachers hooked.
  • Susan Altgelt shared the Texas Connects project which can be replicated in other states.
  • Rowena shared information about iEARN.
  • I talked about Read Across America, MysteryQuest World, and MysteryQuest USA.

Rutgers Camden, the Indy Zoo, and COSI Toledo, are all interested in doing programs that include collaborations between schools in their programming. I think there’s certainly room for content providers to facilitate projects…. the more ideas people have & share the more VCs we can all do!

The conversation also centered around doing cluster projects where classes connect to a content provider and then continue connecting to each other for similar projects in the future.

Paul shared how they are doing problem based learning projects – giving students a big problem – usually related to environmental problem – and then presenting solutions to the experts. CILC has a Community Partnerships program to do these types of projects too that includes grants and partnerships to make these types of events happen.

Not surprisingly, someone brought up the issue of increasing student test scores. iEARN has research on their PD page on how their projects improve student learning. Another person suggested focusing on communication skills that businesses are looking for. We also discussed how the events need to be meaningful and tied to higher level thinking skills.

Paul has a VC Classifieds page with good ideas to get the word out with his teachers.

Robyn Phillips shared information about a project they are planning for Veterans Day connecting with a marine in Iraq. They are working through the Freedom Calls Foundation.

What a fun session sharing connections.

Global Collaborations Birds of a Feather

This morning I’m in the birds of a feather session led by Mike Griffiths from Global Leap.

We looked through the Global Leap website and how to register our schools and find other classes.

We talked quite a bit about the technology and how we could connect. Tools for connecting other than traditional H.323 and H.320 were discussed. We talked about using Skype and Festoon to do free connections with other countries.

We also talked about iEARN projects, and Rowena Gerber from Florida shared how she has done projects with classes that have to travel 10 miles to access one computer. iEARN has lots of standard yearly projects, projects you can stop by for a bit, and projects that are more long term. You don’t have to be a member of iEARN to get on all these projects, but to access the forums there is a membership fee. Most of the projects are via email, but some are via videoconferences through iSight, MSN, through IP/H.323 videoconferencing…

Andrew Knox from the Center for Distance Learning Research shared projects that he’s working on: a internation fitness oriented project, a charity project, measuring steps & progress in P.E. class, etc.

We also talked about the Global Nomads Group and the work they are doing. They have incredible experiences shared each year. Those of us who have done VCs with GNG shared what it was like for our students.

Russ Colbert, Polycom, shared with us some things happening in Australia, New Zealand, etc.

Then I shared my sessions with Pakistan on my blog: with the high school class and the 2nd grade class.

Now we’re moving into a second session on collaboration.