In this final blog post from the MACUL Conference this year, I thought you’d like to know that at the TWICE Annual Meeting, COSI Columbus received the TWICE Board of Director’s Award. This award is given to an organization that makes an outstanding contribution to distance learning in Michigan and throughout the country. It was a delight to see Gail and Barb connected via videoconference to receive the award. We had to hurry the presentation because they had an expert program starting shortly. Congratulations to COSI Columbus and thank you to all the COSI Columbus team for all the great content they provide to our schools.

MACUL Session: Friday, 10:00-11:00 a.m.
Presenters: Danielle Letter, Distance Learning Coordinator, Bridgeport-Spaulding Community School District, and Michael Maison, Media/Technology Coordinator, St. Clair County RESA
Connection: Ann Arbor Hands-on Museum

First Alex gave an overview of each of the programs that Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum offers to the students. Ann Arbor sent sample materials from the programs and everyone got a chance to touch the materials and see what they were like.

Then everyone divided into groups to dissect owl pellets. This activity is part of the Owls from the Inside Out program. Participants carefully open up the owl pellet to examine the bones and see what they can identify. Participants found skulls, lower jaw bones, shoulder bones and more. Owls regurgitate about one pellet a day.

Danielle Letter, the teacher presenting this session, talked about how this type of activity would be very difficult to pull together on her own. Because of this, she feels it is worth the $100 it costs for this program.

This building’s principal mandated one videoconference per grade level per month . They have 92 scheduled for the 2006-2007 school year. There are 42 teachers in the building, so about 2 sessions per teacher each year. They are doing lots of projects, NASA programs, Smithsonian programs, and other content providers.

This was a great session. Participants were really involved and excited. Lots of conversation about how to get videoconferencing in their building, who to contact at their ISD to get help with videoconferencing. The enthusiasm was palpable!

MACUL Session: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
Presenter: Charlon Franke, Teacher, Fraser Public Schools
Connection: Cranbrook Institute of Science

After an introduction from Charlon on how she uses Cranbrook’s programs in her curriculum, Cameron Wood from Cranbrook gave an overview of the programs that they offer.

As Cameron walked us through the activity, he explained how he was accessing the visuals. We started by identifying the three Native American tribes in Michigan. We greeted each other and learned “thank you” and “see you later” in one of the native languages.

Cameron talked about the timeline and showed various artifacts for each time period.

In a discussion of what people need to survive, Cameron draws the items that the students come up with – food, shelter, etc. Peter Reynolds, the keynote speaker today, would have been proud of his line drawings.

Cameron noted that the program can work as a review or an introduction. What varies is how much he leads the students in the question and answer section.

A bartering game teaches students how trading works and economic concepts. While some participants were concerned about how the activity would work, Charlon shared how well Cameron handles the students in the actual videoconference. “I just sit back and say, oh my, is this my class?!”, because they are handling the activity so well.

A cup game teaches students the difference between a communal democracy, an American democracy, and a monarchy.

After the program demo, Cameron shared with us the other programs that Cranbrook offers and took questions and answers.

MACUL Session: Thursday, 1:00-2:00 p.m.
Presenter: Anders Hill, Teacher, Missaukee County Public Schools
Connection: NASA Digital Learning Network, Cleveland, OH

This session started with Anders Hill describing how he uses connections with NASA in his eighth grade science class. He’s used the Cars in Space program with his robotics class, talked to NASA engineers with his rocket unit, and talked to Wilbur Wright about the Bernoulli principle and flight.

NASA started by explaining that all the NASA Centers offer videoconferencing programs to schools, as well as podcasts and webcasts for students. Topics covered include space, flight, ratios and proportions, simple machines, and how to apply science and math to the real world workplace.

Tom Benson showed how he uses the green screen technology to take students to NASA experiments, to the moon, the sun and more! We watched some great video clips of how water behaves in weightless environments. Students always want to know how the astronauts go to the bathroom in space. We saw clips of flying through the International Space Center.

There are a ton of topics and lessons that NASA offers. They are FREE! Most content providers cost something, but NASA’s programs are free.

Tom told us about a class that was connecting to learn about shuttles, and as luck would have it, the shuttle was rendezvousing with the space station. So the students saw it live and Tom narrated the event.

Tom believes strongly that the kids who are in 5th and 6th grade right now will be the ones who make the Mars mission happen.

When kids ask the question, “what do I have to do to become an astronaut,” they put up a big black and white screen with huge letters: DO YOUR HOMEWORK!

The session ended with questions and interaction between the participants and the presenters. Another great videoconferencing session.

MACUL Session: Thursday, 10:00 a.m.
Presenters: Kim Randolph, Teacher, Port Huron Area School District, and Terry Harrington, Assistant Director of Education Technology, St. Clair County RESA
Connection: Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida

First videoconferencing session at MACUL this year is a connection to Mote Marine Laboratory along with Kim Randolph, a third grade teacher, connecting from her classroom in Thomas Edison Elementary, Port Huron, MI.
The connection begins with sound checks between the three sites and welcoming greetings (big HIIIIII) between the conference participants and the students at Thomas Edison Elementary. Laughter all around.

Next the obligatory weather check. It’s 80 degrees in Florida and we all groaned with envy since we had slushy snow overnight.

Mote Marine’s programs start with a high energy visual introduction. Kasey Gaylord started us off with a gameshow about sharks: myths and facts.

Next we learned about the sea turtle session where students learn about nesting habits, adaptations, the sea turtle exhibits, and how they protect the sea turtles in Florida.

Another program, Mammals, Mammoths and Manatees focuses on the manatee exhibit and students learn about manatee training, habit, and more. An interesting part of this program is an activity where students practice training a manatee where the teacher plays the role of manatee.

A video clip showed how students from another class used their Polycom remote to control an ROV in the shark tank at Mote Marine. How cool is that for kids!! The dial tones send the ROV right, left, up and down. We all laughed when a large grouper suddenly appeared on the screen.

Each videoconference program has a PDF content unit with lesson plans, activities and background information to prepare for the videoconference. The materials are aligned to national curriculum standards.

Next, Kim Randolph, teacher at Thomas Edison, shared with us how she uses this videoconference in her curriculum. She showed an example of the math and measuring activity that helps students draw a life size manatee using a grid. She also showed an activity where students learned about adaptations. The students come up with lots of questions at the beginning of the unit. If they don’t find the answers in their reading, they ask those questions during the videoconference. Kim uses several trade books with the unit as well as non-fiction, fiction, drawing, and poetry writing projects.

This year many of the TWICE sessions feature not only the connection to the provider, but a teacher telling us how they integrate the videoconference into a unit. It’s very powerful hearing about the videoconference from the teacher’s perspective. My favorite part is when the students share what they liked about the videoconference and some of the facts they learned about manatees. We all love to hear kids talk!

This morning Ottawa Elementary is connecting to the Baseball Hall of Fame for their Math: Batter Up program.

The program starts with a short video tour of the Baseball Hall of Fame. There’s lots of conversation right at the beginning to get the students thinking about baseball and how math is used in baseball. Next, the presenter gives the students several math problems to solve. Students are sitting at their desks calculating. With each problem, they hear stories about that player/scenario and are walked through step by step in how the answer is found. Students are working mostly with percentages and averages.

Next, the students play a game called Batter Up. Students choose the type of question they want to answer. “The mics are pretty sensitive so if I hear anyone helping the batter up, this will be an automatic out.” The questions come up with nice visuals and clear instructions so students can solve it.

This program is jam packed with math and works the students hard throughout the program. Doing the math within the context of baseball makes it more fun for everyone involved.

We love the Baseball Hall of Fame programs, and this one definitely was worth our time!

The excitement in the room is palpable. Students are organized into groups and sitting on the edge of their seats. Today Chikaming Elementary, River Valley, is connecting to the Challenger Learning Center in West Virginia for their stellar program, Operation Montserrat.

While a bit on the expensive side, the CLC e-missions are the coolest, most interactive programs available out there. The e-missions were developed by the CLC in West Virginia, but the CLC in Kentucky also offers them, as well as the National Space Centre in the UK.

The program starts with students getting settled into their roles and learning about the island, the wind speeds, and the readings coming from the volcano. Things start getting hectic for the students as the hurricane starts coming in towards the island and the volcano starts erupting. Students carefully review maps to understand where the volcano flow was coming down.

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Well, that connection was going great until the connection to CLC started dropping. So I switched the connection so the school was calling them directly and could quickly redial instead of waiting for me to redial for them. Because at the same time, a project connection with Canada couldn’t connect on their own and had to be moved to my bridge to work. And another school that was supposed to be connecting to the Alaska SeaLife Center on their own couldn’t make it work and we tried a ton of things that never worked. Rachel Simon in Alaska is so patient! She said, “Technology is our friend, but sometimes we fight with our friends.” Whew!

But the E-Mission kept going and after touching base with the building coordinator, I learned that the program was wonderful and the teacher and students loved it. Yeah!

Tonight we are participating in another content provider showcase hosted by Macomb ISD.

First we connected to the St. Louis Zoo. The program started with a sampling of their “tour” programs. The tour programs show several of the exhibits at the zoo. First we saw a clip of the anteater video, followed by questions and answers. The zoo presenter asks the students questions about what they heard to see if they listened carefully. Next we did an activity learning about producers and consumers. Their programs include live animals shown on the screen as well. We saw a snake close up on the document camera. The programs are filled with various visuals and lots of conversation and interactive back and forth. We haven’t connected to the St. Louis Zoo yet, but I think we will be connecting there soon!

Next we connected to the International Wolf Center. The cool thing about the Wolf Center is that they have several cameras throughout the center that can be controlled by the presenter using a joystick. It’s fun to look around and see all the different wolves live. We experienced a bit of the Wolf Ecology program and discussed the various things that a wolf might eat.

Last, we connected to the Alaska Sea Life Center. We first learned about the geography of Alaska and how it compares to the rest of the lower 48. Next we experienced some of the activities from their programs, including practicing observation, made clay seals to learn about adaptations, and asked questions and interacted back and forth.

Three great content providers! Thank you to Macomb ISD for sharing yet another showcase with us.