Tag Archives: International VCs

Cool Qlock

Today since I was stuck in my office for lunch due to VCs, I peeked into the ongoing K12 Online Conference. The session at the top of the list was from Joseph Papaleo, Around the World in 80 Minutes. I noticed he was talking about videoconferencing, so I listened. Of course we can always learn something new! Joseph had a nice overview of Google Earth and VC in the classroom. And then, the gem!

Qlock! Check out this tool. I installed it right away and set up the cities that I’m doing VCs with in the next few months. Very cool. Considering I had a timezone oops today, it was just in time learning! Try it out for yourself!

Megaconferences

Do you know about the Megaconferences? If not, then you should sign up & participate this year! Here are announcements from the Megaconference listservs.

Megaconference

Everyone in the world is invited to participate in the Megaconference, 2 November 2006, from the comfort of his or her own office, classroom, or conference room. Registration is now open via the web site http://support.osc.edu/cgi-bin/veventreg/megaconf8. Like any professional conference, presenters and audience members will discuss current projects and developments. Unlike other conferences, hundreds of participants will gather simultaneously from all continents of the world using advanced networks, from universities, K-12 schools, and organizations. This year’s theme — Breaking Down the Barriers: Global Connections– focuses on improving understanding between individuals and cultures, using video conferencing tools. The event runs from morning until evening (EST) that day, to allow participation from around the world. But you can be there as long as you wish.

Megaconference Jr.

The NEW date for Megaconference Jr. 2007 has been set for February 22, 2007, and planning committees need your help to make this year’s event even more of a success than the previous Megaconference Jr. events. This year there will also be several new additions to the event – like a new Virtual Battle of the Bands where musical groups will audition to be part of the grand finale based on the highest number of votes from the international community – which will give participants the opportunity for even more interaction leading up to the event itself. Volunteers are needed in several areas. Please distribute this call for participation widely in your communities.

Also, Megaconference Jr. is looking for student VJs. You can read about how to become a VJ on the Megaconference Jr. blog. (Yet another VC blog you can follow!!)

Megaconferences are great experiences for you & your students, so I encourage you to participate this year!

Royal Tyrrell Museum: Up Close & Palaeo

Still at the Broadband Summer Institute here in Canmore. Now I’m attending a session by Colin Regamey, their new Distance Learning Coordinator. 

The Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta is starting to offer videoconference programming this fall. They have just built a new Atco Tyrrell Learning Centre to support their education outreach programs.

All their programs are correlated to the Alberta Education curriculum. 

Some of their face to face programs include making molds, fossil casting, and digging to find fossils.

They started with pilot programming in 2002-2003. They presented from the ATCO office for this initial programming. Also they’ve piloted some programs this past spring since the new Learning Centre was built. The pilot sessions were the Up Close & Palaeo program. 

The programs include lots of interesting visuals: animations showing the process of fossilization, objects on the document camera, and other visuals.

They work really hard to make the program suit the teachers’ needs. Students submit questions in advance and teachers can request certain topics. 

The first program they are designing is for grade 4, Rockin’ Alberta Resources. The program covers geography, geology, and paleontology. The program will include pre and post materials, lessons, and resources. Included are also fun animated games, similar to those that Mote Marine Laboratory is doing.

New programs they will be adding soon are: 

PIQ: Test Your Palaeo Intelligence, a program to begin or end a classroom study on Palaeontology. The program will be K-12, with specific questions and topics included for each grade level. They are very committed to having their programming tailored to the teachers.

Dinosaurs in the Movies, a program focusing on the evolution of dinosaur science and movies for grades 3 through 12. 

The museum also sells resource books, videos, and other resources to assist teachers in their instruction. Some of the videos are the same ones that are played in the museum. Supplementary material is always good!

The programs are $125 each, and the Up Close and Palaeo program is $200 because it uses an expert from the museum. 

Programs will be available Tuesday to Friday at specific times, and the Up Close and Palaeo program will be available only on Wednesdays at 11:00. (They are on Mountain Time.)

It’s nice to see another content provider getting organized to offer programming for schools!

HyperMirror Pictures

Thank you to Akio Yamanaka for taking pictures at the HyperMirror session at NECC and sending them to me. After the session, they opened the floor for attendees to come on camera and see what it is like. I wanted to try out the hand-clapping pattern for See See My Playmate.


First we demonstrated the pattern, as they girls in Japan hadn’t seen it before.

Here we are trying to line up our hands to “clap.”


Trying to get the timing right!

Almost have it! We only had a couple minutes. I think if we had more time to practice we could have done it.

Here is what it looked like from this end. I am facing the projector screen where I was seeing the same view as the pictures above.

See the big smiles on everyone’s faces. Clearly this technology helps us feel closer together!

Very cool. Thank you Akio for these pictures! I look forward to hearing about future projects with HyperMirror videoconferencing.

Conference Tags: necc necc06

E.164 Dialing

For the last 6 months I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around how e.164 dialing could/should/is working connecting outside of our own networks.

Here are some of the things I’ve discovered.

  • E.164 dialing is a specific kind of H323 dialing your endpoint could do, usually in conjunction with a gatekeeper.
  • There is an educational Global Dialing Scheme in the works. You can read about it on the Internet2 website.
  • Megaconference and Megaconference Jr. use the E.164 Global Dialing Scheme dialing. This requires registering to a gatekeeper that participates in the Global Dialing Scheme (GDS). Gatekeepers can be neighbored together to join this scheme and there is a specific procedure for participating in this. Megaconference Jr. did have to allow some sites to dial the IP address instead of the GDS e.164 number because some units could not connect. It would be interesting to know more about that.
  • The United Kindgom has a service called JVCS that is using the GDS. Yesterday I did a test call with a location in the UK. They gave me their long e.164 number. It looked like the long ones used for the Megaconference dialing, so I registered with the Internet2 Commons gatekeeper to see if it would work. They were able to call my e.164 number on the Internet2 Commons gatekeeper, but I couldn’t call them the same way. We are still investigating why. They were also able to use the JVCS MCU to call me via IP address. (I’ve done a few connections now with JVCS’s MCU and the calls work great.)

Questions I Still Have

  • How do organizations get their gatekeepers registered and organized to participate in GDS? Who organizes that? Is it different for each country? What does it cost to participate? Some of the answers are here, but not enough for me to know how my 70 endpoints could participate.
  • If the vendors are pushing us towards gatekeeper registration as “best practice”, then in K12 we have to get something working so we can keep dialing each other. Is that even possible/feasible?
  • On the other hand, I’ve been thinking about this review of my projects session at NECC.

“Towards the end of the session the presenters had participants talk about implementation ideas in our respective school districts. The two people I spoke with agreed that there are a number of challenges to successful video conferences including cost, the technology and developing the programs. One person from a university said that she had never been part of a video conference yet that didn’t need a technician present to make sure it all worked, that it took time before the video conference to make sure all equipment was working prior to the event, and that often, there were interruptions in the connections. In our small group conversation, we wondered what place video conferencing may continue to play in education with the advent of lower costs communication solutions such as podcasts and web based interactive software such as Elluminate or Tegrity. Only time will tell.”

While I don’t agree totally with the tech support issues raised (I have several media specialists who are now able to do calls on their own with minimal problems), it certainly is a valid point. I’ve already blogged about how teachers can’t be expected to do this on their own.

If the technology is getting more complicated (all this weird dialing) instead of easier to use (I’m thinking specifically of K12 schools with limited tech support who want to connect to any other K12 school out there), what then???

I’m still mulling this over. Please comment if you have any thoughts on this!

In the meantime though, I’m going to keep doing creative curriculum based VCs for my schools!! I still do believe in the power of whole group based quality audio videoconferencing for communication & curriculum reasons!

Hyper-Mirror Videoconferencing

Experience HyperMirror Videoconferencing! Japan-LA-NJ Collaboration! Energize Hands-On Learning!
Agnes Zaorski, Eatontown Public Schools with Takanori Maesako, Osamu Morikawa and Cathy Timpone

I’m in a really cool session about HyperMirror….

Right now during introductions I’m amazed by the blue tarp on the wall and the presenters are in the screen with the remote site! You have to see this! I’ve linked to a picture – but look at the images on this page.

The curriculum focus is on using probes and doing water testing between NJ & Japan.

She’s using phrases like, “we’re sharing data in a HyperMirror with Japan…”

They started with a New Jersey pond study and sometimes an ocean study. In Japan they did a river study.

Hands-on is the best way for students to learn. Students took probes to the water, recorded the data, and brought it back to the classroom for analysis. Two scientists were available in the classroom and via online for the students to ask additional questions.

Any international project includes culture as part of the learning, even in this science collaboration.

HyperMirror makes magic so they look like they in the same room.

How did they solve the time zone! US EST classes came back to school at 6:30 p.m. The Japan kids started at 7:30 a.m. There was a 13 hour difference. Both sites were willing to adjust their learning time. This is THE MOST important part of doing international connections. Being flexible and both sides giving are really important.

They used Moodle as their online community for asynchronous discussion forums to bypass the email issues. They had forums for troubleshooting, ask the expert, general discussions, discussing the latest results, assessment and more. They also use the glossary tool in Moodle.

They went to their water sources and tested various places using litmus paper, probes and computers. “Technology was perceived as process, product and tool.”

The findings were recorded in Excel and DataStudio. Students generated questions about their data.

This is a great example of a higher level thinking project that I’ve been thinking about all week.

So, next, how does HyperMirror work?

Problems with current VC – participants in different spaces and display splits them into 2 worlds.

The development concept is that we can be in a new conversation space that is on screen in a new space together. Digital Mirror World or HyperWorld.

The inventor showed a real mirror in the PowerPoint, and then a HyperMirror. Electronic Mirror. He had a create set of short movies to explain the concept. We are in the same room. What I see is What You See. WISIWYS.

There’s a mixer in between that mixes the two together. You get a live feed where everyone is in the same room using chromakey mixing. Here’s the graphic from the page on how to make it that was in his PowerPoint.


The emergence of etiquette as if you were in the same room. People start to act as if they were in the same room.

This is just wild!!! Amazing!

They started in 2001 and have connected with China, Korea, Afghanistan, Kenya, Mongolia since then.

So now they are going to do water tests on from both sides of the Pacific Ocean. The students are doing the water tests side by side in HyperMirror.
I really wish I’d had a digital camera! Next year I’ll have to come to NECC (if I can come) with a digital camera!

Now we’re doing an origami lesson together. Everyone is folding to make a crab.

This was a really cool session. I see Dale Hilton from the Cleveland Museum of Art here in this session. They already have the chromakey, so it seems it wouldn’t take much for them to implement this. Maybe soon we’ll be “hypermirroring” with the Cleveland Museum of Art!!

Every year at NECC I see a “WOW” connection. This was it for this year!!

Oops. Nope. We might not be doing this. The unit that mixes is research at the Osaka University and isn’t a commerical product. So maybe we won’t be doing it soon.

Hmmm. this works with iChat too.

Other things: virtual dressups with other cultures. Very cool. Very fun. Bringing people together into the same room virtually. Awesome.

Ok one more thing. The switch only needs to be at one site. The blue screen is only at the room that has the mixer. Cool. So we can do this with them!!!

Conference Tags: necc necc06

July 4th Workshop Reflection

So yesterday I worked hard on the 4th of July in an all day workshop – Designing Quality Interactive Projects for Videoconferencing. 18 participants from the U.S., Mexico, Japan, and New Zealand connected all day to 4 teachers from Cobourg District Collegiate Institute East (link their website), Cobourg, Ontario. At the end of the day we connected to Carol Daunt from the Learning Technologies User Group in Sydney Australia.

The international flavor of the participants and connections brought up several conversations about international connections and how to best work around the time zones. We talked about www.timeanddate.com and how to use the Meeting Planner to find out which time will work best. Often it means you have to connect outside of school time and so does your partner school. It’s very helpful to visit the site ahead of time before even approaching an international partner so you can immediately see what time will work best for each location.

We spent the day in two major categories of videoconference projects: (1) exchange projects such as Read Around the Planet and Michigan Week Exchange (communities & environment exchanges), and (2) multipoint projects such as MysteryQuest.

As a result of jumping straight into presenting and experiencing sample student projects, the participants learned various lessons about videoconferencing. After each experience we talked about what we learned about VC – how to interact with microphones, camera presets, lighting issues, how often calls get dropped, what makes the experience a quality experience, and more.

The participant presentations were wonderful to watch, even with limited time to prepare. We had oral reading of poetry, a celebration of international holidays, a presentation on pesticide laws in Cobourg, Ontario, and creative presentations with clues to find beaches around the world. The participants really engaged in their presentations and experienced what it takes to make a quality videoconference presentation.

Unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to create projects on the collaborativeVCs wiki site. But stay tuned for future projects created in other workshops.

One of my main take-aways from the workshop is the huge value of networking. I say this all the time…. “the more people you know with access to VC, the more VCs you can do” …. but it was reaffirmed again in the workshop. We spent significant time sharing what each participant was doing with VC, and I learned from the sharing too! Thank you to all the participants and remote locations who took the time to connect on the 4th of July!

Conference Tags: necc necc06

RAP: Read Around the Planet 2007

Great news!! The TWICE Board met June 27 and voted in a new name to the TWICE VC Celebration of NEA’s Read Across America. The new name indicates that our 2006 pilot with Alberta, Canada and the United Kingdom was a smashing success. So, get ready for…..

Read Around the Planet 2007
A Celebration of
“NEA’s Read Across America”
Sponsored by Polycom

Read Around the Planet 2007 will have several new features:

  • 5 days for regular teacher/classroom matches (March 1-2, 5-7)
  • 1 new day for modern language class matches (March 9)
  • A new matching database with logins for everyone involved to manage their part of the project
  • International participation (Definitely from Canada and the United Kingdom. Help us spread the word to others!)
  • Sponsorship from Polycom to support the coordination

*Disclaimer. While we are using this new name to be inclusive to our international friends, this name does NOT guarantee U.S. schools an international connection. Every request will be matched randomly as usual in this project.

The website isn’t organized for 2007 yet, but I’m sharing the info now because we’re talking about it at NECC 06 and also so you can put the dates on your calendar! Get ready to RAP!!! No, you don’t have to rap or sing! But it sure is fun to include songs!

Read more about RAP 2007. Learn more about TWICE.

Global Leap Blog

Mike Griffiths from Global Leap has been blogging all year and I didn’t even know it! I’m delighted to find the Global Leap blog. I’m sure we can all learn important lessons for international videoconferencing! Thanks, Mike, for sharing your experiences!!

Megaconference Jr. Magic

Here are some more highlights from today's Megaconference Jr.

Megaconference Jr. is facilitated mainly by student VJs. It's a great opportunity for these students to practice and showcase their communication and presentation skills.

Here's a picture of the students from Riverview Elementary School giving clues about their location in the Rainy River District. There were quite a few "where are we" type presentations and clues today which made it more interesting and engaging for classes watching.

This picture shows University School in Ohio sharing information about space science simulations. I really liked the layout used here as the presenting students took questions from the 5 interactive sites assigned to their session. In past Megaconferences I have really enjoyed the roll calls even though they can be fairly chaotic. So I was disappointed at first when I saw the schedule for this year's Megaconference Jr. But I have changed my mind! I think the 5 interactive sites per session has worked very well and shown everyone the true possibilities for student-to-student project connections.

Here's another example of the interaction during sessions. This class did a Jeopardy game as you can see in the picture.

Megaconference Jr. is always an amazing experience and a learning experience for videoconferencing etiquette. This year 235 sites are connected and there's always some weird glitches due to mics not being muted and people not paying attention to their site that is connected. It's a good way to learn what NOT to do in a videoconference. It's also a good way to learn to keep going no matter what! I was pleased to see that the presenters and VJs were well trained to keep going no matter who popped in and interrupted the program!

Another neat new feature this year is Virtual Postcards. But they aren't web-based as I first thought upon hearing the name. To leave a postcard, you dial into the IP address given at one of the times listed and record your session with the assistance of a technician. It's a video postcard! Recorded using your endpoint! How cool is that! To view the postcards you dial into another IP address and you can select the postcards from a menu.

I would sure like to know what type of technology is behind that. I'm suspecting a Codian but I'm not sure. Do any of you know? Leave a comment!

Kudos to the Megaconference Jr. team of volunteers. It takes so much work to make a big event like this happen! And we participants sure appreciate all the labor & love that goes into this project! The impact on student global understanding is incredible!