Tag Archives: jazzivc09

June Jazz Evaluation

Just received the evaluation data from the June Jazz workshop last week. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. All 72 participants said they would recommend Jazz to another teacher. I thought one of the open-ended questions on the evaluation form would make a great Wordle.

Please describe the most valuable experience you feel that you had while participating in the 123VC course.

June Jazz Eval 2009

Nice collection of words, isn’t it!? If you participated in Jazz before, feel free to comment with your interpretation.

Ending Jazz, Ideas for Short MysteryQuests

In Jazz this morning, as we were debriefing from the week, the middle school and high school people really wanted to do MysteryQuest in one class period. Their class periods are 55 or 60 minutes. We brainstormed how it could work:

New Schedule

  • 4 groups x 5 min presentations = 20 min. for group presentations
  • 15 minutes for research (can use computers from the start)
  • SKIP the Q&A and re-evaluate to increase the pressure, make it harder, and make it shorter
  • 5 min. sharing guesses
  • 5 min. sharing answers

45 min total with 10 minutes lee-way for technical difficulties and transitions.

Tips for shorter preparation time:

  • all the sections do the same city/country
  • use the same visuals (posters/PowerPoint) for all the sections

Transitions

  • put in the prep materials some tips for making fast transitions
  • know the schedule and have kids up at the mic ready to go
  • when you’re about to present, have some kids taking notes and the others getting ready to go

Whew! What an amazing week of Jazz June 2009. I love this workshop – everyone learns so much! In the words of one of my participants:

I feel very fortunate to be a member of this workshop. It’s like summer camp for adults, and the best part is, our “summer camp” travelled from state to state and overseas! :)

Well, I must say that I was very intimidated by technology in general. At the beginning of this week. I just thought that I would learn about vc and still let the librarian run the vc’s like in the past. Well, I am excited to say that thanks to Janine, I really will set up the vc. Actually, I have about 8 scheduled for next year. Thank you so much Janine for taking away my vc anxiety and introducing me to so many other online things.

You can review the blog reflections and the Flickr photos of this amazing workshop!

June Jazz Day 3

3rd day of June Jazz. The week is going too fast!

Roll Calls

  • Our roll calls today were just hysterically fun! We had fun cheers from each of the sites. We used @sparky1fan’s Cheer video clips and ideas to prepare.

MysteryQuest Beaches

  • We had a great time with MysteryQuest Beaches this morning. Everyone shared clues about a beach in their area. We had some very creative presentations, including clues given by Jhiymy Mhiyles, the Bondi Beach “caveman” in Australia (under the “table house”).
  • We also had a major tech glitch in the middle of one of the presentations. My bridge rebooted and we lost Internet in our room. But after 5 minutes of panic, we were back up and running again and kept going.

Guest Speaker: Global Nomads

  • The Global Nomads Pulse simulation on Wed is always a highlight of Jazz for me. We tackled the tough issue of the economy with a discussion of questions such as:
  • What would be a possible solution to the global economic crises?
  • What other areas or issues have been impacted by the economic crisis?
  • What changes have been made in your school due to the economic crisis?

Small Groups

  • Small groups worked hard on writing their lessons today. Heard lots of good ideas and look forward to those projects being online.

One more day of instruction and simulations; then sharing projects and the celebration. Love this workshop!

June Jazz Day 2

2nd day of Jazz all done! Here’s a few thoughts & comments:

Roll Call

  • The roll call was really fun again this morning. Wales led it, and waved their flags and wished us “bora da” (good morning in Welsh). Everyone shared their weather forecast for today and the rest of the week, and we shared it in F and C so that Wales could understand the numbers. OH was very creative and included a song and dance!

Read Around the Planet from Wales @ JazzFinishing up Read Around the Planet

  • Yesterday Wales left us early because they had a thunderstorm that knocked out their power. So this morning we took a few moments to hear their Read Around the Planet exchange presentation from yesterday. They shared a very cute puppet show of the story of Billy Goat Gruff and the Baby Troll, complete with puppets and a backdrop!

Math Marvels

  • For simulation time today, we solved math problems for Math Marvels. One of the problems involved tomatoes. As we gave the answers, we heard three different pronunciations of tomAtoes, tomahtoes, and tomaters.

Q&A with Wales & BC

  • Two of the participants in Wales led our Q&A time. We did a round of asking questions with Wales. Each site asked two questions and then Wales asked them two questions. Then we did another round the same way with British Columbia.
  • Nice set up of questions modeled by Dallas – I’m ___ from ____ and in our area _____, what is ______ like in your country?
  • Everyone really enjoyed the conversation time with Wales & BC; and we learned about how to ask good questions.

Guest Speakers

  • Our guest speakers were NASA DLN (Stennis) and the San Francisco Giants. We had a nice taste of the programs and got a flavor for how interactive their programs are.

Super Bridge DudeBehind the Scenes

  • It takes a lot of work and techncial expertise to pull off the connections for the Jazz workshop. Shane, award winning bridge dude at Region 12, TX bridges 8 sites together for guest speaker time. Look how many monitors it takes. The skype chats are for the facilitators to give feedback to Shane or solve problems.

Groups are working well together – there are 11 total groups across my four sites. Looking forward to some great projects on Friday!

June Jazz 2009: Day 1

First day of the June session of 123 VC: Jazzing Up Your Curriculum with Videoconferencing (aka Jazz). I have nice group of 12 participants from my two counties, and a wide spread of grade levels from Young 5s to High School.

New Roll Call Format

  • This year instead of just a video/audio check in the roll call at the beginning of simulations and guest speakers, we beefed up the roll call with more content. Monday we share our location; Tuesday weather; Wednesday a cheer or clap; Thursday local trivia; and Friday what we learned.
  • I loved the roll call this morning. Each site had fun visuals about their area as well as a map. I loved the cowboy hat from Hays CISD TX; and the buckeyes from OH. This is a great addition to this workshop!

Read Around the Planet @ JazzExchanges

  • In the first simulation participants experience four types of exchanges: Read Around the Planet, Animal Exchange, Community Exchange, and Monster Match.
  • I have four high school English teachers who want to VC with Wales for British Lit. They did a Babbles with Bard game show and quizzed our Wales partners on Shakespeare quotes. Very nice! My animal exchange group didn’t just present an animal – they made clues for the other group to guess the animal! Nice modeling of more interactive exchanges. I’m glad to see examples of more than just “presenting” but also actually interacting and engaging the partner class.

Guest Speakers

  • Our first guest speaker was Andy Campbell at LearnNCO. His “gross science” is always a hit with the teachers.
  • James Tapankov shared The Seven Things. At a minimum, have everyone: Move. Write or Draw. Talk. Share.

Connections

  • At least in this June session, we made a concerted effort to have less bridges in the call. The guest speaker time, with all 8 sites connecting together, we used just two bridges – my Tandberg MPS bridge with 4 sites; and Lori’s group on ESC12’s Codian bridge with 4 sites.
  • The connection quality with guest speakers is gorgeous this year! (so far).

Whew! A great day, and mostly happy people seeing the possibilities for their curriculum!

Jazz Tools

While I’m thinking about Jazz this week, I thought it would be fun to make a list of all the tools we use in this workshop. And I probably won’t think of them all! If you know of any I missed, please comment!

Videoconferencing

  • H323, Polycom, Tandberg, LifeSize, Codian, etc.
  • Skype
  • TinyChat

Web 2.0

  • Skype
  • WordPress
  • Wikispaces
  • Pbworks
  • Twitter

e-Learning

  • Moodle

Content Creation

  • Camtasia: For video tutorials
  • GoogleDocs: Wordprocessing and spreadsheets used extensively
  • GoogleSites: For Lead facilitators organization & for small groups final projects
  • GoogleMaps: For a map of all participating sites
  • GoogeEarth: For a map of all participating sites

What tools are you using in workshops this summer?

Jazz Workshop Next Week

If you’re following several of us VC geeks on our blogs and Twitter, you’re about to hear a lot this summer about Jazz. So I thought a review of this workshop might be in order.

What is Jazz?

123 VC: Jazzing Up Your Curriculum with Videoconferencing (aka Jazz) is a grassroots workshop spread across three countries. This summer we have 3 weeks of sessions, 3 countries, over 500 participants getting training. To learn more about Jazz, review these links. You can learn what it is and how we work, lead, and learn together.

JazzIVC Twitter Tag

You can also follow our comments with the #jazzivc twitter hash tag.

Invitation to Comment

Have you participated in the Jazz workshop? Please comment and share you liked best?

Are you participating this summer? Please comment and share what you are looking forward to!

Do you wish you could participate? What questions do you have? Please comment!