Tag Archives: Collaborations

Test Call Turns into Planning Period

This afternoon I had a test call with Florida for an upcoming “presidential debate” between two classes on the energy policies of both candidates.

We tested, and then our media specialists chatted with the teacher in Florida for a while. Then they decided it would be easier to have the teachers talk to each other. Our media specialist went down to take our teachers’ class for a few moments so the teachers could talk to each other.

This worked out great because then the teachers compared notes on their students, what they were planning for the videoconference, and discussed the need to talk again about the debate questions etc.

I can tell this is going to be a great connection! The Florida class took the Democratic side, so our class took the Republican side. Our class has two students who are planning to impersonate McCain and Palin to welcome the FL class in the introduction. It should be really fun and a great learning experience all around. Stay tuned for a report on the actual connection on October 29!

MAGPI / Constitution Center Election Program

Check out this program from MAGPI and the National Constitution Center:

ISSUES FACING PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES: A New Exchange Program from the National Constitution Center!

DATE: September 23, 2008

TIME: 1-3 p.m. EDT

TARGET AUDIENCE: High School Students

HOW TO PARTICIPATE:

In order to be an interactive videoconference site for this event, your site must have H.323 videoconferencing capabilities. Your site must also be connected to your national high speed research and education network (i.e. Internet2 in the United States).

DESCRIPTION:

The National Constitution Center is excited to invite your school to participate in the latest installment of its national student program, The Exchange: A Marketplace of Student Ideas. This event will take place on Tuesday September 23, 2008 from 1pm-3pm EDT. This installment of The Exchange, Setting the Student Platform 2008, asks students to consider the issues facing the presidential candidates in 2008 and work together to create a political platform for the nation’s students. This Exchange will follow up on the work done by students in May 2008 to create a student agenda. The discussion will be hosted by SuChin Pak from MTV and Dr. Michael Hogan from the Center for Democratic Deliberation and Pennsylvania State University.

The Exchange allows students all over the country to converse with one another about current constitutional issues using Internet-2 videoconferencing. It is an exciting way for students to explore issues with their classmates and peers in other parts of the nation.

Schools that participate in The Exchange will be asked to use the provided curriculum to prepare their students to be part of the conversation. Students will also have the opportunity to create and post their own media include art, video, and websites in The Exchange online community, which can be accessed from the National Constitution Center’s website at: http://www.constitutioncenter.org/ncc_edu_TheExchange.aspx. Some student created media may be selected to be displayed during the video conference. If your students decide to create any video or audio clips, we ask them to not exceed 2 minuets in length.

If your school chooses to participate in The Exchange, you will be asked to select one student to be part of the videoconference round table. During the videoconference, students will have an opportunity to interact with each other and share their thoughts on numerous issues facing the country. Students will use this deliberation to assess each issue, and create a student platform for the upcoming presidential election. Additionally, students who are not taking part in the discussion will be able to send questions and comments to SuChin and the participating students via a simultaneous online chat.

Participating schools must have connectivity to the INTERNET2 network and the ability to do H.323 videoconferencing.

While there is no cost to participate in this event, we do will ask schools to work to make sure this event is a success. Schools will be responsible for the following:

• Selection of student representative
• Preparation of students through the use of the provided Exchange curriculum
• Support student created materials and submit them to our new social networking site being developed for this project
• Participation and successful completion of videoconference testing prior to the event with the National Constitution Center

HOW TO PARTICIPATE:

I hope you are able to participate in this remarkable opportunity. If interested, please contact Jason Allen at either jallen@constitutioncenter.org or 215.409.6644 by September 12, 2008 for registration and information. Mandatory videoconference testing will be the following Friday, September 19, 2008.

Heather Weisse Walsh
MAGPI Applications Coordinator
3401 Walnut Street, Suite 233A
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228
phone: 215-573-6417
email: hweisse@magpi.net

Sessions I Wish I Could Attend

The bummer about presenting a half day workshop here is that I’m missing some really cool presentations! Look at these two in particular:

Gord Smith, Bev Knutson-Shaw, Belinda Crowsen
Family Treasures – Museum Project
Videoconferencing is allowing schools and museums to work together in new and creative ways. Expanding on a 2006 pilot program with County Central High School in Vulcan, seven classes from across the Palliser Regional School District worked in cooperation with the Galt Museum & Archives to research and present their Family Treasures. This year, Grade 7 and 8 students from Vulcan, Champion, Arrowwood, Milo and Coaldale began their work on October 18 and presented their findings to fellow students, Galt Museum staff, parents and community members via VC.

Jocelyn Littlefair, Cathy King
VC Circles: People, Culture, Language
This session will focus on the use of videoconferencing in second language instruction. Tools, tricks, and techniques for using videoconferencing and supportive technologies in full course delivery, as well as examples of multipoint videoconference events involving French Immersion, Francophone, and French as a Second Language students will be shared.

Though they are during my workshop, they are in the same general area. So maybe if I give everyone a break I can sneak over and grab a handout!

Creating Connections: Cool Collaborations

In Julia Heighway‘s keynote this morning, she featured some interesting collaborations. Both of these ones here are using other Internet technologies to support the videoconference.

Human Rights Club

Several high schools videoconferenced about genocide and the holocaust. The students decided they wanted to start a Human Rights Club. They created a wiki to support their work together. Check it out at The Human Condition

Hong Kong
We videoconferenced during the keynote with Chun Fung from Hong Kong who posted this project request on CILC. Roxanne’s school, Clifton Elementary, did one of the first videoconferences with his class. Isn’t the world small!?

They started with cultural exchange, dances, group games, etc

Now they are looking for longer lasting collaborations. “To obtain the full benefit of VC, it must be used as a wholistic program.” They combine VC with pen pals to establish relationships ahead of time. Videoconferencing as just a “one-off” is just a pity. It’s better to establish a long-term relationship. They did a children’s art festival to raise money for an AIDS orphanage.

Now they are working on long term programs in computer science, ICT, and math. They are doing a project with Google Sketchup. They emailed the models to each other, and then videoconferenced with each other to explain their model.

Now they are doing projects with Scratch – where the students are learning programming with icons. The students will create games, send them to each other, play and dissect each other’s games, and then videoconference with each other.

“There’s so much more to gain from a sustained collaboration vs. a quick “one-off” collaboration.” – Chun Fung

First International Math Olympiad for elementary students. There’s one for high school, but not for elementary. So now they want to focus on specific subjects instead of just cultural exchanges or practicing English. All of their projects are open and they are looking for long term partnerships.

As a sidenote, I was sitting next to Roxanne in this session and it was pretty interesting that her class did the To Kill a Mockingbird project featured, the connection with Hong Kong, and my class was the audience for the winning KC3 project featured.

Leadership Jazz

This post is for those of you who have participated in the Jazz workshop or are thinking of joining us in 2009. The rest of you may find it a bit too far afield from my usual posts. 🙂

So, I’m on vacation, enjoying the Canmore Banff area. After hiking and canoing almost to the point of exhaustion, today we wandered through art galleries. In one of them, I glanced over a brochure and noticed that tonight there was a program called Leadership Jazz in the Banff Centre sponsored by Leadership Development, free! So we went and enjoyed a great interactive evening with Jazz Impact. What follows are my scribbles and notes, direct quotes…. if you’ve participated in Jazz , I’m sure this will resonate with you like it did for me.

Observations on what Jazz musicians do….
Jazz is a HOW not a WHAT…

  • listening to each other
  • letting each have their turn to shine
  • building off each other’s ideas
  • some dissonance in the chords but rhythm
  • smiling, showing passion
  • they don’t try to replicate a song exactly the same as it was the last time
  • jazz is full of diminished chords – 7ths! – cool chords – but not perfect clean triad majors

Random thoughts….

  • To find creativity go to the intersection of disciplines…. “intersectional innovation”
  • collaborative innovations, collaborative negotiations
  • risk, listening, courage to embrace change
  • jazz musicians are comfortable with discomfort – the wildness of Jazz
  • some may think improvisation is loss of control and unpredictability, but it’s really moving from certainty of the present moment to the uncertainty of what comes next
  • one person improvising alone is not relevant or useful to business or an organization
  • structure plus flexibility – structured time plus local time
  • jazz is a way to interpret, discover, and actualize our ideas simultaneously
  • jazz is the only place where you lead and support at the same time – syncopation – critical that both pieces happen at each site
  • none of the individual parts lose their integrity – unique but together
  • they trust each other – Jerome said sometimes you have to bear the burden of someone who doesn’t have it together – it’s like pulling teeth – one person can throw it off by being a drag – but in their jazz ensemble, they can relax – it feels like home – you know everyone will do their part. It takes being prepared and ready to for what is next – when deciding who will be the soloist next….
  • you’re in the place of having blind folds – you feel the intention of the people you’re “jazzing” with

The presentation was organized around five important parts to jazz: autonomy, passion, risk, innovation, listening.

Autonomy

  • interactive autonomy – team focused interaction
  • feeling responsibility for your part – this is huge!!
  • intellectual athletics – hard work to blend with others – critical for our collaboration
  • when you lead in jazz, you’re the soloist – the other people create the context
  • the supportive role is critical; comping skills are critical – we must learn to support others – you have to be able to support and lead both, to host a Jazz workshop
  • interactive innovation is not achieved by power
  • note how they give clues to know when to read and when to pull back and let others lead

Passion

  • passion makes connecting possible – connecting between the ensemble members, and connecting with the audience
  • we have a fear of uncertainty around creativity; must let it go
  • passion requires emotional commitment
  • emotional commitment gets us part hard spots and hurdles and difficult times – you can’t just “receive” the Jazz workshop – you have to be emotionally committed to do your part and jump in where you’re needed it
  • you manage passion by valuing it
  • how do you create an environment where passion is at the individual level?
  • innovation is contagious – new ideas compliment the other person’s ideas
  • “I’m playing with someone who is actually listening” – is what you find out when they play off your ideas (Jerome)
  • level of accountability is crucial to passion – each person’s piece is crucial for success
  • you have joy and pleasure in others’ successes
  • Respect. Space. Play. (Audience comment)
  • Respect is important when you’re taking risks

Risk

  • Jazz is high risk
  • orchestra is top down – skills to interpret a composed score from the past; with jazz its constant risk of own musical invention in real time with others
  • the tune sets up the foundation to provide minimal boundaries
  • a zone of improvisational freedom
  • most management structures try to mitigate uncertainty
  • functioning in real time, you can’t eliminate uncertainty
  • change and risk are constant – if you can’t live with the uncertainty and ambiguity and variety of connection quality and experiences, you don’t belong in Jazz
  • ask questions without fear of reprisal
  • “take the risk“

Innovation

  • Do the structures in you work with provide fluid flexibility?
  • chord changes are the structure, the foundation for the tune – the basic framework of Jazz is the foundation – but lots can happen by being flexible around it…
  • constantly trying to discover new ways to move forward
  • the ideas go back and forth between the soloist and the rhythm section (leading and changing Jazz each year with new ideas)
  • much higher level of cross functional understanding and influence between leader and support section

Listening
We all put on blindfolds, were divided into four sections, and we created music together. Really cool. Listened so carefully to each other and how we fit into to big picture!

  • How do you listen for innovation?
  • creative destruction
  • reinvention of a core value established in the past
  • empathic listening – becoming cognizant of all the assumptions and judgments we create to protect against uncertainty, then suspending those judgment- do we all listen carefully to each other throughout Jazz and in preparation for? do we teach our participants to listen to each other during the small group time?

What connections and thoughts pop into your mind about collaborative experiences like Jazz and others???

What's the Hardest Thing about Making Collaborative Projects Happen?

I’m still getting ready for Elevate 2008, and I’m considering revamping my “Designing Quality Interactive Collaborative Projects” workshop. It’s time for an upgrade, I think!

So, help me out and answer this question if you have a moment:

What is the hardest thing about making a collaboration or videoconference project happen?

Just to help get you thinking, here are a couple answers from some of the coordinators and teachers I serve:

  • Middle school teacher: I haven’t done a collaboration yet because of the preparation involved.
  • Two elementary coordinators: It’s so frustrating when your partner doesn’t follow through.

What do you think? and let me know your perspective too – coordinator at what level? what level teacher? Please comment! Then I’ll post later about how my workshop went…

Two Successful Jazz Sessions

So, how is your summer going? Going, gone? Feels like that to me.

Last week we participated in the second successful Jazz workshop of the summer. If you’re not familiar with this workshop, visit the website.

The participants and facilitators really enjoy the process of immersion into videoconferencing in the curriculum.

Some features from this summer’s sessions include:

How did your professional development sessions go this summer?

Last Notes from NECC

I’m just cleaning off my computer desktop from NECC and a few scribbles here and there.

I lost two video clips due to somehow losing the sound on them. Very frustrating. But I wanted to mention these two poster sessions in case you missed them.

Dissolving Boundaries in Ireland
Nigel Metcalfe, from the National University of Ireland, dissolvingboundaries@nuim.ie, was presenting about their project to connect kids via videoconference from Northern Ireland and Ireland. The students got to know each other and then worked on projects together in all content areas. You can read more about the project at  dissolvingboundaries.org. I was particularly interested in the research (peer reviewed published research!) section. While the organization supports specifically this project, some of the schools are using VC for other activities as well.

Synchronous at a Distance: Bridging the Gap
The other clip I lost was of Shirley Pickle and Leesa Potts sharing about the Arkansas shared classes distance learning program. The state offers programs to meet the needs of high schools that can’t offer those classes on their own. Leesa is one of the teachers and shared some tips for getting kids to know each other early on with introductions, presentations and other strategies. Be sure to check out the website for the Arkansas Distance Learning Center as you’ll find many tips and tools.

A Tale of Three Cities: Poetry, Performance, Teamwork, Technology, Learning

This presentation at NECC 2008 is by Global Writes. The program brings a writing workshop to the classroom. The teaching artist spend several weeks in the classroom and serves as a professional poet role model in their classroom. The technology is used to bring students together to perform their poems. It’s 4-12th grade students.

Authentic assessment. They have rules for critiquing, praise and respectful criticism. Students feel safer to share because there is a careful structure for feedback.

All of the classes participate in a competition over 2 weeks; 4 sessions a day and then finals. There isn’t a fee (so far) to be in the tournament.

Students give feedback on the writing as well as their presentation of their ideas – body language, pace, gestures, spoken word.

Blogs and podcasts are used to support the writing and reading too. The SlamFam blog is used both by current students and those who have moved on and still post and comment on the work on the blogs.
In some of the cases, the younger siblings came into the class and contributed to the same blog their older siblings were posting to.

Student outcomes include improved attendance, increased motivation, increased self-esteem & self-awareness, enhanced communication and social skills. (A story of a kid who stuttered all the time except when he was performing his poems.)

Teacher outcomes include extended literacy instruction options, collaborative teaching skills, arts integration skills.

They got funding from AEMDD to do some actual research on their program. Three classes at each school studied over 3 years with 4 treatment schools and 4 control.  75% of the kids are still writing poetry. During the research grant the students jumped from 40% planning to go to college to 85% planning to go to college.

The teachers felt more skilled in teaching writing – so the program also mentors the teachers. The data is all just from the Bronx. Now they are collecting data and expanding the program to Chicago to see if the program is replicable.

They are working on creating a replicable and sustainable model.

Shivers up and down my spine while the kids recited their poetry. Incredible!!!!