Videoconferencing Out on a Lim

Classroom Exchange
Our Upton Middle School students just finished connecting to the Reef HQ. Now, they are talking to middle school students at Scots College in Sydney.

We had 3 girls from our school, because everyone else is at soccer practice or other activities. The school we connected to was an all boys school, so it was a fun exchange.

Our students started by telling a little about our town, St. Joseph and the schools in the district. Then they shared a presentation about their area, including their beaches. We learned all about rugby and cricket, and some of the best Aussie sites to see. Another presentation from the Australian students covered the flora and fauna in their area.

Here are some questions we asked each the Australian students. Our students had used CultureGrams to compare the countries and prepare questions.

• What brands do you usually wear?
• Australians live longer than Americans, so why do you think that is? Our students think it’s because of smoking in the U.S. Do people smoke a lot in Australia?
• How many of you have cell phones?
• What are some of the popular books around your school?
• When you think of Americans, what do you think of? (loud, “out there”)
• What do you think is most important for us to learn about Australia?
• What TV shows do you watch and what bands do you listen to?
• What do you have for pets?

Some of the funny word differences that we really laughed about were:

• thongs in Australia, flip flops in the U.S. (lots of red faces on both sides with this one)
• “heaps” in Australia, “lots” in the U.S.

Some of the questions they asked us were:

• What are popular sports in Michigan?
• What do you do in an average day?
• Is basketball big in your area?
• Do you travel around the U.S. a lot?
• Do you have South Park on TV?
• When you think of Australians, what do you think of? (surfers, kangaroos)
• Have you ever heard of Steve Irwin?
• Do you play rugby?

A funny line from Australia was “we’re the only country that eats our emblem.”

These two experiences were part of a unit on Australia and turned out to be a great experience. We learned some lessons about scheduling and hopefully will have more students on our end next time.

This afternoon Coloma Middle School, one of our RUS grant schools, is participating in a 3 hour Around the World session with countries in Central and South America. The sessions focus on “misconceptions resolved” as misconceptions are part of the 7th grade language arts curriculum for Coloma.

Costa Rica
Lincoln School, Costa Rica started with a presentation with an overview of their country and their school and daily life. Next they presented their game show to quiz our students on their culture. Many of the questions were taken from their presentation. Some of the questions were:

• What is the capital of Costa Rica?
• What is the most popular sport in Costa Rica?
• What countries neighbor Costa Rica?

Next, our class presented about Coloma, Michigan, and misconceptions about America. They created humorous skits about the misconceptions. We started the game show, and then ran out of time. Clearly, though the students were having a great time!

Nicaragua
Soon the American Nicaraguan School connected and we checked audio and video. Their students weren’t quite ready, so we played the “small town America” game for a few more minutes.

Then Nicaragua shared their humorous skits about misconceptions about Nicaragua. They were video clips liked the ones from Coloma. Both sets of video clips were a little hard to understand due to soft voices and background noise. We certainly learned a few lessons with those skits!

Then we played a Jeopardy game about Nicaragua Physical Geography, History and Culture, and Human Geography. We rotated between American and Costa Rica to compete in the game. Questions included the largest lake, types of food, etc. We just finished the Nicaragua game show in time.

We took a 20 min break for our Michigan students to eat since it was 5:00 p.m. here.

Guatemala
Soon Guatemala connected in. We started with quick intros from the participating classes, and then they started their presentation. They showed many pictures. Then we played their jeopardy game with American and Nicaragua competing. Guatemala had trouble with their skit video clips, so we played the jeopardy game about rural America with Nicaragua and Guatemala competing. This was a really fun format and the students in each class were really involved.

Finally at the end, we were able to watch the skits from Guatemala with misconceptions about their country.

Lessons Learned
We learned again that it’s important to slow down and speak clearly! It’s so easy to get excited and talk so fast! Laughing while talking makes it even harder to understand. We also had trouble with all of the video clips for the skits. They were very difficult to hear. We’ll have to think more about what could make these work better! I think that video clips probably can’t work unless there is a mic on the presentation. In a live skit, you can have the students come closer to the mic and speak slower. However in a taped skit, it’s hard to make it easier to hear.

Due to a comedy of scheduling problems, we didn’t connect to a country every hour for 12 hours as we originally planned. However we had a great connection with these three schools. We appreciate the hard work from all the students who participated in this set of videoconferences!

USDLA: KC3 by Jan Zanetis

Showing the Stamford High School programs…

History of KC3 – Jan’s conversation with Alan November inspired it the start of the program.

15 schools signed up to create content; 100 schools indicated interested in being the test audiences for the contest.

The classes signed up and the KC3 team worked with them to prepare their presentations for the contest.

Then they did the program with a test audience and it was recorded on a TANDBERG Content Server in TN. The judges then accessed the programs afterwards and completed an online rubric to judge the program.

The project has snowballed where the classes are presenting their programs to other classes, and even generating additional projects and videoconferences with each other.

There were some great little clips of the students. It’s always fun to see kids present. We all laughed and enjoyed the students’ creativity!

Another clip showed the Q&A after the field trip was over. The classes brainstormed other VCs they could do with each other and what else they could teach each other about their communities. These are the same kind of amazing conversations that happen after Read Around the Planet and similar events.

In preparing their presentations, the students addressed a lot of NETS standards.

Jan has a pyramid of VC with distance classes at the bottom, then accessing content providers, then collaborative student projects, and at the top content creation in the classroom.

Comment from a student – “I didn’t realize that teaching was so hard.” That’s a great quote!!

The teachers said that it was hard work, but that the level of student engagement was incredible. Students had to dig deeper to really understand the in depth content to share it with the other class.

The teachers also said it was really eye-opening to see their students present the content – they saw their students engaging with the content at a different level than they usually see.

USDLA Session: Don’t Make Me Collaborate by Kat Bailey and Samantha Penney

Some snippets from this session…

A lot of 30 second ideas of things you can do with your cell phone. What can you learn or do in 30 seconds…. well some of them you could post in 30 seconds, but if you were going to think reflectively about them, you couldn’t do it in 30 seconds.

Wikinomics by Tapscott covers these areas:

• sharing
• acting globally
• openness
• peering

Collaborative culture

• ceding some control
• sharing responsibility
• embracing transparency
• managing conflict
• projects take on a life of their own

These are described in this session in the context of teaching online - letting your students experience a collaborative culture. Suggestions for managing group learning online like having student contracts for their work in it.

Vision of Students Today - digital ethnography. When I searched that, there’s a K-12 version of it. Did you know? I’m surprised how many of the participants here haven’t seen this video. Does that mean I’m going to too many conferences?? or reading too many blogs?

Suggestions include - create an infrastructure for collaboration in your class. I think this is what Jazz does - creates an infrastructure for collaboration. I can think of some other groups I’m in where we use collaborative tools to create the infrastructure for collaboration.

The conversations about cell phones at this conference is really intriguing. There was a Marc Prensky quote about learning anything on a cell phone.

There were some hints at constructivist learning - “leave out the piece you want the students to learn” and let them find it.

It seems like the new “must have” for conference presenters is a clip from YouTube. Hmm. There was a cool one with flowers and poetry that was a sample of student work.

Reference to Classroom20Wiki - with a recommendation of using these ideas in the classroom. It’s really about integrating technology in the curriculum, but with a Web 2.0 twist, a distance learning twist, and focusing on higher ed classrooms. Interesting perspective

Engaging your “waiting collaborators”: use the collaborative tools to create surmountable challenges and let them have fun with it.

I think we’re doing well with using the Web 2.0 tools to support our collaborative projects, as well as training such as Jazz. How are you using collaborative tools to support your work?

Did you see this in the Wainhouse Research Bulletin a few weeks ago? Be sure to click the link to see the picture!

MIT Launches One Videoconferencing System per Child (OVPC) Nicholas Nery of The Manchurian Institute of Technology thinks everyone in the world should have a videoconferencing system.
The world famous professor, author, researcher, and diplomat has launched the non-profit OVPC organization to design, manufacture, and distribute the world’s most affordable videoconferencing system, priced at less than $100 and aimed at youngsters in the developing world. With moisture-resistant seals and a crash-proof hard drive, combined with built-in WiFi, colorful cables and connectors, solar panels for mobility and power generation in remote areas, and a high definition camera, this hardly-no-frills system supports 720p video and Siren-14 stereo audio. Prototypes of the SIP-based, H.264-compliant device are due to ship in Q4-08.
The company is concentrating on serving populations in underdeveloped and/or war-torn regions of Western Africa, South East Asia, and Texas.

Texas at the end of the paragraph surprised me. If any of you are involved, please comment and tell us more about it!

There’s also an interesting commentary on this development on the OLPC News site. I hope that those involved can imagine more instructional educationally engaging experiences besides just this:

Imagine entire country’s classrooms, full of children, in a massive multiplayer online conference.

Good that someone’s thinking about the bandwidth implications too:

I just hope that SES Global can handle all that data traffic on its donated bandwidth or there will be a lot of disappointed children (and adults).

So far, we’re still working on access to videoconferencing in each school. One of my superintendents wanted to know how to get VC in all the classrooms, even though it’s highly unlikely (at their present use rate) that they’ll ever do more than one VC at a time. Do you see a time in the future when every classroom at least has VC? Do you think the vendors will ever make desktop VC low cost that has audio designed for a classroom and maybe camera presets too? is that too much to ask for a low cost desktop system? What do you think?

One of my schools had conflicts with the scheduled Read Around the Planet dates this year, so I helped them find partners later in March. Our first connections were this week, and more are scheduled next week.

Today’s session is one of three that we scheduled with Wales. We’ve been working on several collaborations with Wales.

Our class is first grade, and their students are close to the equivalent to 3rd and 4th grade students.

Our class started with a song about sounds and words that have those sounds. Then the students shared a story called Lazy Mary. The class read the story together and two students acted it out.

The class in Wales had different groups talk about various components of Welsh culture.

Their students asked our students, “Where is Wales?” our kids said, England! One of the things that I’ve learned as we do more connections with the United Kingdom is that there is a perception in the U.S. that the UK is the same as England. Whereas people from Wales and Scotland really don’t appreciate that! I’m not sure that this misconception actually got cleared up in the session today. I don’t know what it would take to clear this up, but I think probably when we connect to schools in Wales and Scotland we need a map and an explanation of where England is compared to where they are. When I first started to understand this confusion, I had to look it up online to get a grasp of the situation. It’s certainly confusing on this side of the Atlantic!

Here are some examples of the questions the students asked each other.

• Are you actually by Lake Michigan?
• What is the weather there?
• What time is it there?
• Do you have uniforms?
• What subjects do you learn?
• How many students are in your school?
• What’s the coolest thing about your culture?
• What TV shows and movies do you like? Simpsons and SpongeBob on both sides of the Atlantic!
• What kinds of foods do you eat?

It was a great connection and hopefully we’ll continue our collaboration with Wales.

After listening to Gary Stager at the MACUL 08 Conference, I went up to ask him about the handouts from his session yesterday that I missed.  In the course of the conversation, he said to me,

“Why do people identify themselves with just one technology?”

He was referring to some of the ideas in the Web 2.0 session he did yesterday that I had missed. He didn’t mean to, but he challenged my own practice.

It made me think! (Which I think is the point of listening to Gary Stager.)

I like to refer to myself as a “one technology girl”, referring to videoconferencing. I try to keep my blog focused on videoconferencing. Every time I go somewhere or see something or learn something, I’m trying to see how it ties to videoconferencing.

I want to say, how can we make our videoconferences more constructive? But I feel like I’m coming at it from the wrong angle, by starting with the technology. On the other hand, it seems that videoconferencing is a perfect fit for social constructivist learning because it’s a communication technology. I need to keep thinking about this….

One of Gary’s points was “less us, more them.”

Some beginning thoughts are:

• what if the kids picked who they wanted to connect to instead of the teacher?
• what if the kids researched to find and request an expert to connect with them via videoconferencing?
• how often do we have the kids generate the activities and interaction?
• with the KC3 programs, do the kids decide how to represent the topic? do they decide the topic?
• what structures like MysteryQuest or Holiday Challenges could we create that are based on even more constructivist principles?

Gary also emphasized the importance of good prompts. We need more good prompts for teachers and students using videoconferencing. What tough questions could help them head down to a path of interaction with experts and/or peers?

These are just a few beginning random thoughts stirred up after listening to Gary today.  Off to the next session, but these ideas will keep simmering….

Note: This post was written for the MACUL conference blog 2008 with attendees in mind. However I’m reposting it here because it seems it would be useful for readers here too.

Session: Collaborations Around the Planet: Social Networking for Educational Videoconferencing

In my session today, we started with two connections to New York State. Unfortunately, since I was presenting, I couldn’t grab any pictures. But those kids were so cute! The first class presented the animal riddles. Each first grader had a 3-4 sentence riddle about an animal. The teachers guessed the animals. The teachers loved it and it was a great model of how to get the audience involved in your presentation.

In the second connection, the students presented a skit based on the book Andrew’s Loose Tooth. Most of the students took turns narrating, and other students acted out the story. After both presentations, the teachers and students asked each other questions. “How many snow days have you had?” “What do you like about videoconferencing?” “Where are you?” etc.

These connections were illustrations of the project Read Around the Planet. We were also able to compare a 384K videoconference (standard definition) with an HD (high definition) 2M connection from Polycom HDX to HDX. We saw an obvious difference in the clarity. We still got some packet loss and pixelation, but we’re pretty sure the conference didn’t give us QoS on our connection so it was probably on this end.

Afterwards, we talked about how to get videoconferencing going, participating in Michigan Week Connections, how to use the Collaborations Around the Planet website, and shared stories of other videoconferences we’ve done.

Daylight savings time changes on Sunday in the U.S.! Did you remember?

It doesn’t affect our connections with Canada, because they switch at the same time we do. But it does affect connections with the UK (and Arizona). I have three with the UK that I have to adjust because I forgot (AGAIN!).

Life was a lot easier “way back when” we switched to daylight savings time at the same time as the UK! What was Congress thinking??!!

Yet another little detail that I have to keep paying attention too!!! How are you handling time zone changes these days?

This afternoon, students from Calvin Britain Elementary, Benton Harbor, are doing their first videoconference and presenting a series of skits and songs for other students in our county. The focus is on Black inventors from the past, particularly those from the 20th century.

After a welcome from the principal, the students sang Lift Every Voice.

Next, the students performed a skit showing what life would be like if there were no Black people in the world. Each part of the day featured missing everyday items like the iron, the clothes dryer, the lawn mower, the auto gear-shift, the pencil sharpener, and the traffic light that were invented by African-Americans.

The students then all sang the song, We Shall Overcome, including actions to the song.

After this, the students gave some clues about some famous African-Americans in the form of “I am” statements. The listening students tried to guess the person.

This program was originally scheduled for the end of February, but a snow day made us reschedule for today.

The lesson for this interaction is posted online.