Tag Archives: Collaborations

Construction Trades Videoconference

Today we have a special videoconference between two construction trades classes in Michigan. New Buffalo High School and Wayne-Westland High School are reporting to each other on their construction house project. Thanks to Steven Michael from Wayne RESA, a webcam, Polycom PVX, and a cable modem, the Wayne-Westland class is presenting from their construction site!

After introductions, Wayne-Westland started a tour of the house. The sound of boots in empty rooms echoed through the house. Students explained the various section of the house including:


A custom fireplace.


Shelves.


Custom windowsills


A window in the master bedroom.


Tile on the bathroom floor.


Walking through the house.


The siding.

We found that it was easier to hear the students after they had stopped at a location vs. when they were walking around the house. Background noise of construction vehicles and people walking around the house caused audio issues a few times and made it hard to hear.

Then our class shared their construction project, using a model and photos. Finally, the students asked each other questions. Unlike the elementary exchanges where usually students immediately talk about social topics, the high school students started with good questions related to their content.

  • Have you faced any major problems on your house this year?
  • How big is your house and what does it cost?
  • Have you had any work related accidents this year?

Next year we hope to do this again with a class somewhere in the southern U.S. where construction is somewhat different than here in Michigan. So if you have a construction trades class and would be willing to work with us next spring, let me know!

Being Patient with Teachers

Stress One of the challenges of coordinating videoconferencing is what to do when teachers cancel or change their minds on doing a videoconference. While it can be very frustrating for those who have put in time scheduling, doing test calls, and all the preparation necessary, I think we have to step back and look at it from the teacher’s perspective.

Cancellation Reasons
They may not always tell us why they are canceling, but almost always it’s a very good reason. Family issues, health issues, school scheduling issues that they didn’t know about before, curriculum pressures…. these are all reasons why teachers cancel. They sign up thinking that it will work out, but when it comes right down to it, they can’t make it happen.

Sometimes, with a little patience and encouragement in discussion with the teacher, you can resolve the issue satisfactorily to salvage the program. But other times it honestly has to be canceled.

Reacting to Cancellations
In our early days of videoconferencing, I sent some strongly worded letters to teachers about canceling programs. Guess what? They’ve never done a videoconference since. What was I thinking?!! We don’t do that anymore. We can’t take it personally! We have to consider their point of view and be gracious and understanding!

Of course we want teachers to realize that scheduling is challenging, but teachers are really stressed and under a lot of pressure. If we add to that stress, we are teaching them that videoconferencing isn’t worth the trouble. We have to cut them some slack and work with them to resolve whatever challenges arise so that they will continue to participate and use videoconferencing.

What About You?
So how do you handle cancellations? Any advice? What tips do you have to help teachers work through challenges with a videoconference?

Visiting Edmonton, Canada

Thanks to Shane Grundy, Edmonton Public Schools, for being willing to connect with our students who are learning about Canada.

Trinity Lutheran, St. Joseph, students started by introducing themselves, telling about their hobbies, places to visit and eat in the U.S., one thing that they didn’t know about Canada, and what they’d like to do if they could visit Canada.

This class has done videoconferencing before, and you can see the evidence in the preparation of students for the “getting to know you” part. The little paragraphs are written on note cards and students shared some neat personal connections. I let the students use the remote and the document camera controls this time. They did a great job paying attention and switching the camera as appropriate.

It was neat and very affirming for the students here to hear the reaction to their presentation.

Then the class in Edmonton shared a PowerPoint and groups shared presentations about several important topics about Canada including government, inventions, geography, and more.

All of these interactions include the favorite question and answer time. Here’s a couple highlights:

  • Here’s an interesting fact. The students in their school can choose French or Punjabi as their second language to study.
  • In a discussion of national parks, the students here said “take me with you!!!” when referring to Banff National Park. One of the Edmonton students said, “We’ll bring you in through the screen and you can come with us.” Lots of laughter!

This was the last of a series of point to point connections we’ve had with our local middle school students who are studying about Canada. We look forward to scheduling even more of these next year!

More Student Reflections on RAP

Thanks again to Google Alerts, here are some more student reflections on Read Around the Planet. These are from 6th grade students in Edmonton Public Schools. Middle school reflections are more in depth and you can see how they tied their videoconference experiences to content they were learning in class. Both classes presented plays, and the students reflected on their performance compared to the other class and what they learned from how the other class presented. This is a great evaluation activity and it’s neat to be able to peek into the classroom and listen to the students’ thinking!

Thanks Room 22 for sharing your thoughts & reflections! If you enjoyed their reflections, leave them a note on their map here. It’ll be a great geography lesson for them!

Why Projects Failed This Year

I’m beginning to get into “end of the year” reflection and planning mode. One of the things that’s been simmering in my brain for a while now is why projects failed this year. Yes, I figured you might want to read about what didn’t work, as well as our success stories.

Snow Days
In February this year we had several snow days. This made it very difficult to reschedule; and often teachers felt that they now had less time to cover the required curriculum. So in a few instances, we just never rescheduled. Unfortunate, but if we want teachers to keep using VC, we have to be flexible and understanding of the constraints they work under.

Emails
For one of our project ideas this year, both schools were blocking the emails of the other school. What’s the chance of that? The project planning started in November with sporadic emails back and forth through March until we finally gave up. Email filters have been especially annoying this year. At the slightest doubt of whether they received the note, you should pick up the phone!

Follow-Up
Some of the great ideas that my teachers had this year never came to fruition due to a lack of follow-up. With more pressing active projects moving along, I didn’t have time to email and call teachers who weren’t responding. I have a Filemaker Pro registration system to keep track of ideas, requests, and program registrations, but there are always those project ideas that didn’t ever happen. Ideally, at least once a week I should be checking up on the progress of project ideas. But the busyness of RAP this year derailed several other project ideas. (On the other hand, we had 80 RAP connections, so that’s nothing to sniff at!)

To really make follow-up work, a coordinator needs a system for keeping track of ideas, a method to consistently check in with teachers, and time set aside regularly (weekly?) to work on it. Do you have any other follow-up strategies or ideas? Please comment and share!

Building Coordinators
This year I’ve invested a lot of time, training, and mentoring into my local building coordinators, especially those involved in our RUS grant. This has heightened my sense that building coordinators are crucial to the success of videoconferencing. It’s not enough to have a district level person, or a regional level person promoting and supporting videoconferencing. The building level coordinator, whether they are a teacher, media specialist, media parapro, or even a secretary, help so much in the facilitation of VCs in their building. The teachers already know & trust them!

So because I’ve been noticing this more in my own area, I have come to the belief that one factor that affects our projects with others is whether or not THEY have a building coordinator. I worked with a regional coordinator for 3 or 4 projects this year and none of them came to fruition. This organization doesn’t have a building level coordinators. I could never get teacher email addresses from my contact so I could email everyone with what needed to be done to get the project off the ground. Without someone local to help make it happen, it’s very difficult to make the project actually happen.

Project Definition
I’ve thought for quite a while that the fastest way to make a project happen is to have it clearly defined. If you describe clearly exactly what you want to do, what you want the other class to do, and be very specific on the dates & times, you can make a project happen fairly quickly. That’s why I make everyone in my online classes write up their project! And why I recommend very specific ads for projects.

When you say, let’s do something on x topic and find a partner, then you have a lot of negotiating to do. More often than not, the project falls apart. Times don’t work out. Topics don’t work out. It takes so long to negotiate that the teachers are past that curriculum by the time the idea is defined.

Roxanne Glaser, wrote an interesting post on her blog last week about the difference between collaborations and projects. I think this idea should be explored more. As we can define recommended procedures around these activities, it will be easier for newbies to jump in and participated effectively. I think that Read Around the Planet is more of a project because the teachers sign up for dates & times and because there are teacher materials etc. for it. Sometimes the teachers negotiate what they are going to do, but more often they prepare a presentation and show up & do it. Maybe it’s more of a continuum with strict structure on one end, and open negotiation and shared planning on the other end. I know I’ve spent most of my time and energy trying to help teachers define their projects with fairly good structure. More time could be spend on planning tools for the collaboration/negotiation end of the continuum.

How ’bout you?
So what was your experience this year? What made your projects fail? And what lessons can we all learn from that?

If I Had All the Time….

If I had all the time in the world, I would make all these dreams for next year happen. As it is, I’ll probably have to pick & choose. But here’s my dream list right now.

Literature Circle Matching
Two of my local teachers borrowed ASK kits for The Breadwinner this year and did a literature circle project together. They met several times via videoconference. I would like to take what they did, ideas from this project I learned about at NECC last year, and materials from our language arts consultant to make a teacher packet. Then use some kind of a matching system to match my teachers together and/or find partners for them elsewhere.

8th Grade HistoryQuest
We’ve talked about doing a HistoryQuest or MysteryQuest U.S. History for 8th grade for a few years now. Maybe this is the year to make the materials and get the project going!

LiteratureQuest Expansion
One of my local teachers wrote LiteratureQuest last year, and I’d like to expand this project widely so all my local high school English teachers who might want to do this can find a partner and can do the session during their class period(s).

Invasive Species
One of my local teachers wrote this project two years ago. The first year we ran it, we turned away so many classes interested. This year that building had bandwidth issues, so we didn’t get it off the ground. But I’d like to make this one happen for all my local classes that want it.

I Spy with Google Earth
This idea from Paul Hieronymous has been on my todo list for a while. I like to see our in house Google Earth expert, Kevin Clark, run this for our students. Kevin and I have talked about it before, just haven’t made it happen yet.

Mrs. Claus Reading to Students
The couple of classes who participated in the Mrs. Claus sessions with CESA 7 last December loved it. One of our staff members came in during one of the sessions and said she’d love to do that for our kids. So of course I’m going to take her up on it! Our K-2 buildings with videoconferencing equipment will definitely enjoy these sessions and I need to offer more content for them!

Partner Buildings
So many of my buildings tried to dial into my office unit this year and got a busy signal. Our usage has doubled since last year, and last year doubled from the year before. The growth is phenomenal! So one idea I have to help my buildings is to partner them together for mentoring, testing, doing projects together etc. This idea is still very new in my brain, so I haven’t thought about the details of how I would do it yet. But the few buildings who have already done several connections with each other gives preliminary evidence of the power of this idea.

Friendly Letters
One of my new building coordinators has an idea to partner all the teachers in the building next year with another class to do their Friendly Letters lessons. Imagine pen pals plus VC! This of course has lots of potential and I want to make sure that their idea comes to fruition and that it’s documented in a way that can be replicated by other teachers/buildings.

Online Experience
The Michigan high school graduation requirements now include a required Online Experience (see also the Companion Document). I would like to see one or two videoconference + online experience activities developed to help our schools meet this requirement in an engaging way. I’m thinking of the ASK Deluxe programs we’ve done with Jim Stovall (ASK plus blogging). There may be other ways to tie high school curriculum to online experiences to interactive videoconferencing. Some brainstorming needs to happen!

Videoconferencing Club
When we connected with Taiwan for Read Around the Planet, we found out that their class is actually a Videoconferencing Club. I would love to get a club like this started for our high schools. I think it would increase exposure and understanding of videoconferencing at the high school level.

Canada ASK
I really want to get some help from a Canadian media specialist/librarian on a good book for our 6th grade students who are studying Canada and one that we could talk to the author or a specialist related to Canada studies. This idea has been on my list for a while and I still have hope that someday we’ll make it happen.

Constitution Day comes so quickly after the start of the school year. Last year we thought we’d pull something together but it happened so quickly. Planning will have to start this summer. I’m thinking maybe interviews with local legislators might be a place to start. It needs to be an activity that doesn’t take much preparation since it’s so soon after the school year starts.

So many ideas, so little time. What’s on YOUR wish list for next year?

Magic Bullet for High School?

Here’s an interesting thought. One of my local high school teachers won a free field trip from me at a workshop in February. Just recently her media specialist asked me if the money can be saved for next year. She commented that teachers love videoconferences when they can show up and participate, but if the videoconference requires preparation, it’s “like pulling teeth.”

So why is that?

The high school curriculum is very, very tight with so much to cover. It’s tough for teachers to find ways to integrate quality videoconference experiences. They have to choose activities that are the most efficient and time effective for covering curriculum. It’s very difficult to integrate time consuming creative constructivist lessons.

So what can we do about it? I think we need to develop more activities and projects that really tightly fit the curriculum. That cover required curriculum in an appropriate, engaging way. And whenever possible, make sure they are available to be scheduled during the class period. You can only pull kids from class so many times before the other teachers start to hate videoconferencing.

Does this vibe with your experience too?

Kids Reflect on Read Around the Planet

RAP picture from RAP Photo GalleryGoogle Alerts picked up some more notes about Read Around the Planet for me this week. My favorite are these kids’ responses to Read Around the Planet a week or two ago. Students reflected on their own presentations, their nervousness, what they learned from the other class, and gave ideas on how the presentations could be better next time. Titles are exactly as the students entered them. Having students reflect on their learning and performance in a videoconference seems like a great evaluation tool to me. Would you agree?

More RAP Newspaper Articles

Thanks to Google Alerts, here are several more Read Around the Planet news articles, blog entries and school reports.

And my favorite post from Shane Grundy, 6th grade teacher for the Edmonton Public Schools in Alberta, Canada. I’ve quoted a snippet here, but you should read his whole post along with the comments and continued conversation on the value of videoconferencing.

… The reason I like this conference so much is because it’s so easy. You submit your name, recieve an e-mail telling you who your partner class is, then share a story with them. While that is a wonderful experience in itself, the real magic happens after the sharing. The students get a chance to talk to each other. In my school I co-ordinated 9 different connections – all between Canada and the US. Each time the students were amazed to discover that despite the different flags and weather patterns – we are all the same. Children thousands of kilometers away all play. The all love recess and hate math. They study hard and play harder. Each time I disconnected from the remote site the first reaction was always – “WOW, They’re just like us.” Didn’t matter if they were kindergarten, or grade six – mainstream, learning strategies, or an alternative program, they all reacted the same. They all knew they had just made a connection to people a world away, and they were just like them. Everyone has a different story to tell, we all walk different paths, but in the end, people are people – no matter where they’re from, the colour of their skin, anthem they sing, or grade they’re in. People are people. I can’t think of a better lesson to teach our students. Or a better way to teach it.

YES!!! And as Roxanne Glaser said to me on Friday, nothing worth doing is easy. While RAP is lots of hard work, it’s worth the lessons the students learn!

LiteratureQuest: Need American Literature Class Partners

Interested in a LiteratureQuest? We need three high school American Literature classes to participate in a MysteryQuest-like LiteratureQuest. We’d love to have you participate!

One of my local teachers designed this activity last summer in the Jazzing Up Your Curriculum with VC workshop. And now we are finally implementing it! I look forward to seeing this model work in one class period with just two classes participating. I think it may be just what we need to increase high school use of videoconferencing.