Tag Archives: Collaborations

National Distance Learning Week Awards

Last post from the CILC Symposium 2007.

Yesterday, November 13, at the luncheon, the NDLW awards were given out. I was glad that some of my favorite people won – COSI Columbus, and the AT&T Videoconferencing website (which started so many of us on our videoconferencing journey.)

But my favorite award winners were Roxanne Glaser and Shane Howard from Region 12, TX. We collaborate on so many events with Region 12 – the sharing goes both ways for projects like MysteryQuest, ASK, Monster Match, Jazz, Mini-Jazz, etc. etc.

Dona Weber, OH, was gracious enough to take this picture of the three of us. And Roxanne was so kind to let me hold her award for the MysteryGuest PD model – which is a really cool extension of the MQ idea and you should check it out.

07-11-14awards.jpg

Congratulations Roxanne & Shane for awards well deserved! And also to all the others who also won or who were nominated.

Collaborations Breakout with Paul Hieronymous

The session started with people sharing their collaborations and their hopes. This session was facilitated by Paul. Be sure to check out his blog.

Collaborative Projects Shared

Types of collaborations

  • Classroom and classroom
  • Class and business (duct tape commercials)
  • High school and elementary (Vocational school and kindergarten)
  • Collaborating with a content provider  – plan ahead of time
  • Do the content provider project as a multipoint – get the classes started, and then the kids present to the museum as a judge, or do a follow-up afterwards

Driving question: Why aren’t all our teachers doing this? What are the excuses?

  • Traditional teaching style
  • Teachers are driven by the urgent; time
  • Administrative support
  • The scheduling issues
  • “I do something right, and you tell one person. I do something wrong, and you tell 5, 6, 7 people about it.”
  • We don’t promote the positive things we do enough: ways to share – blog, podcast, newsletter, staff meetings, bulletin boards, etc.
  • Work with the ones that are showing up and are interested.
  • It’s extra work.
  • It’s unknown. It’s scary.
  • It’s giving up control.
  • Some educators don’t understand the value of collaborative learning.

Get a digital camera in the room and take a picture of it. Use that to share the ideas. Take the pictures and present to the board. Roxanne – “if you want more stuff, use stuff more.”  Get administrative support. Write up stories about it for the school & the board. Do internal marketing.

Paul: Help teachers see how the projects hit the standards.

Use faculty time and superintendent’s  conference day and do something on a big scale so everyone knows what it is.

Read the projects on the CILC Collaboration Center and be an audience for a school to get ideas. Also read the ideas

Rene Carver shared how he puts on his Cat in the Hat hat on and reads to the kids via VC. It gets them excited and it’s so easy and simple to get started with it.  Paul also does Connect & Read. Just a really easy experience to get them started. They walk away saying, “that was easy. What can I do next?” For high school, participating in a multipoint interview where they only get 2 questions. It’s easier to start with. Babysteps are a key piece to getting people involved.

Teachers have to experience it so they know what it is.  Find some ways to provide an experience. Do it during a staff meeting. Lots of the content providers (such as the Columbus Z00) do 15-20 minute demos so that teachers can experience so they know what it is.

Collaborate with the universities so that the new teachers coming in can experience videoconferencing and online learning.  The universities aren’t used to this, and when they see how elementary is using it; they learn new ways to use VC.

Find one person to give it a shot. Start small and build up from there.

Time and state mandated tests are also an issue. Tommy recommended finding the lowest performing objective of your students on your test scores. Have your kids do a collaborative project where they teach other schools about that objective.

Tommy offers a Santa Claus program that gets the schools started with VC. And then they say, “what else can I do?”

Holiday Traditions Conference from St. Francis. Santa facilitates it. Paul has classes come in & out all day participating.

Every teacher has one lesson that they love and do well. Take that project you’ve done for years and add another class to it. Maybe they will present or do problems together.

You’ve got to give to receive.

Thanks Paul for facilitating a wonderful discussion.

"Janet Collaborate" with UK Schools

janetcollaborate1.gifHey! If you want to do collaborative projects with schools in the UK, you should register at the new Janet Collaborate site. Schools in the UK are using it to schedule with UK content providers, to do collaborative projects with each other and more.

One principle behind this site is pretty cool – everything is called an “opportunity” no matter who offers it. There are two kinds of opportunities: scheduled opportunities with a date & time and open-ended opportunities that can be negotiated with the partner. Sometimes we get hung up on categories. Here everything is an opportunity.

It has a connection to the JVCS scheduling system, which allows schools in the UK to schedule directly with the JVCS bridge from within the site. How cool is that?!

I know I’ll be coming back here when I need UK partners for projects like EcoConversations and others. Check it out!

Planned Pauses

Here’s a little tidbit I learned from a participant in one of my online classes (who prefers to remain anonymous). Plan pauses into the agenda for your videoconferences. 

For example,  after one class presents, mute for a few minutes and debrief with your class. What feedback might you want to give them? What constructive comments could you share?

Another appropriate time for a muted pause is just before asking questions of the other school. Have the students brainstorm what questions would be useful to ask.

These pauses can be like the Think Pair Share cooperative learning strategy. The think time (planned pause) gives the students opportunity to increase the quality of the interaction. Think time increases the depth of learning.

So, how have YOU used pauses in your videoconferences?

RAP is a "gateway drug" to videoconferencing

Yesterday afternoon I was chatting with Daniel Maas, RAP Verification Partner for Alberta, about the upcoming Read Around the Planet 2008. I’ve been doing training for our RAP Verification Partners the last couple days. As we talked about the benefits to kids, Danny mentioned the ways that Read Around the Planet plants seeds for other videoconferences.

  • It’s professional development. Teachers (and sometimes whole schools and districts) who see videoconferencing as a tool for full length classes and meetings suddenly realize the potential for classroom-to-classroom VC projects. After they have one great experience, they begin to brainstorm other curriculum ways to use videoconferencing for collaborative projects.
  • It spawns additional projects. We always hear stories of teachers who create continuing projects with the RAP partners. Teachers also design new curriculum projects based on what they learned in Read Around the Planet. There are many copy cat RAP projects as well. The model is easily replicated.
  • It’s easy. Danny shared how RAP can be easily adapted to whatever the students are covering in their curriculum during the event. Having students present their learning fits well into most curriculum areas.

After sharing these ideas, Danny quipped, “RAP is like the gateway drug to videoconferencing.” I thought that was funny enough to share with you! It’s an apt metaphor, isn’t it? Do you agree? Has your participation in Read Around the Planet spawned other projects and use of videoconferencing? Leave a comment & share!

Preparing for Read Around the Planet

Yesterday I posted updated information about Read Around the Planet 2008 on the TWICE blog. I will be posting information related to RAP over there instead of here. So if you’re subscribed to this blog and want to participate in Read Around the Planet 2008, you really should subscribe to the TWICE blog too!!

If you need help with subscribing, here are a couple tutorials to assist you:

Spiraling Collaborative Projects

Have you ever had your collaborative videoconference projects take on a life of their own? Recently several projects that I’ve been involved in have spiraled (out of control?) to create even more events for students. Here are a few examples:

  • 07-10-30monster.jpgMonster Match. Roxanne Glaser was kind enough to use us to fill a few “leftover” spots she had in her local project, Monster Match. On October 11, she needed 3 classes from me. By the end of the next day, I had 25 classes participating!!! As Roxanne, says, the project “blew up” in my service area! Most of my schools are connecting point-to-point, and many of them are connecting locally.
  • Extending Monster Match. In addition, I’ve heard from a few teachers that they are planning future connections with their partners from Monster Match. One building partnership has expanded to grade levels that weren’t participating in Monster Match.
  • Canada partnership. A few weeks ago, someone who had attended one of my VC presentations emailed wanting to do a collaborative project. I think they were originally thinking just one event. Little did they know! I forwarded the note to one of my enthusiastic building coordinators, and now they have nine connections planned!

It’s exciting to see hours of training and professional development pay off. It’s exciting to see teachers realize from a model project (such as Monster Match) all the other curriculum activities they could do with their partner class. And voila! Here they are creating simple curriculum learning experiences to benefit their kids. My new model of “letting go” and training my buildings to be independent is resulting in ever more increasing use of curriculum videoconferencing.

Interesting Characters to VC With

So, who could your students talk to today? There are some really creative ideas floating around on the vc blogosphere!

These are just a few. What ideas do YOU have?

Kids Creating Community Content

Did you notice the announcement for KC3 – Kids Creating Community Content?

If you’re looking for ways to engage students in authentic research, presentation skills and use of technology then you’ll want to be involved in the 2007-2008 Kids Creating Community Content (KC3) Contest.

THE CONTEST
From east to west, urban or rural, we each live in a unique community. What can we learn from our area, from our varied citizens or natural resources? What can we share with other students that will enhance their view of our country or our world? This standards based project seeks to tap into the creative nature of students as they look at their community with new eyes and explore ways to share their findings with others using videoconferencing and technology as a resource.

THE CHALLENGE
Students in grades 7 – 12 create an engaging and dynamic videoconference content program about their community to be offered to classrooms nationally.

This project is modeled after Tommy Bearden‘s Cotton: Plant of Many Uses program designed by high school students. Check it out & maybe YOU will submit something!

VC Book Club with NetMeeting

Today I spent the day helping out at the AT&T / MACUL Student Technology Showcase. Teams of students displayed technology projects in the halls of the Michigan State Capitol Building. After the teams had set up their display boards and laptops with sample student projects, the halls filled with legislators, photographers, and reporters. A nice variety of multimedia, programming, video production, podcasting, and digital storytelling projects were shared as students practiced their presentation skills.

Of course the team with the word “videoconferencing” in their title caught my eye! A class had a book club conversation with another class within the district. They used 12 webcams in the lab. The other school had 12 webcams as well. Students talked about the book one-on-one with the student at the other site. They usually talked to each other during their lunch time. They used NetMeeting and used the chat when the picture/audio was freezing up.

It’s an interesting use of desktop videoconferencing. I think we’ll continue to see applications of both web based and classroom videoconferencing that make sense for the curriculum. What great uses of desktop VC in the classroom have you seen recently?