Culture Exchange with Pakistan

Posted on March 30, 2006 by Janine Lim

This morning a group of high school students from Decatur High School talked to high school students in Pakistan. After a bit of a rough start with technology, the classes started the discussion.

The discussion ranged from cultural questions like sports, favorite music, to more politically sensitive issues like what the students think of their presidents and the Iraq War. Some interesting notes from the conversation:

  1. When asked about the practice of covering women, one of their girls asked our students about nuns wearing the habit. This was just one example of the students in Pakistan communicating articulately and understanding the broader examples of an issue. I enjoyed hearing their responses to our students' questions.
  2. They asked us some tough questions about obesity, drug use, and casinos in our country and area.
  3. One of their students asked us, "You aren't wearing uniforms, but we are wearing uniforms. Do you think it makes any difference?"
  4. The classes also compared rural and urban living in their countries. The classes discovered that students in both countries enjoy surfing and chatting on the Internet, hanging out with friends at the mall, and playing computer games.
  5. The Kashmir discussion was very enlightening. The students in Pakistan explained that the real fight is over control of the water. We don't hear that in our media and were surprised to understand the real issue. Hearing the story from someone living in the country is better than hearing it in the media.

It was an interesting conversation. Both sides had some misconceptions about each other that were cleared up in the conversation. I think a little more structure to the conversation would have been helpful. It is also crucial to get to know each other before diving into tough issues. Knowing a bit about the other participants, whether from a neighboring town, or another country, is essential for setting the tone of the conversation.

Filed under: Collaborations, International VCs | Comments Off

In Depth: Autopsy

Posted on March 29, 2006 by Janine Lim

On Monday, one of our new teachers from Bridgman High School participated COSI Columbus’ In Depth: Autopsy program. It was a health-science class. I didn’t blog it because I’ve blogged that session before. Plus it’s really hard for me to watch since it’s so graphic! But I just had to share with you (with permission) my teacher’s comments on the program:

It was such a wonderful experience.  They learned a ton in a very short period of time.  They did prepare and do the prework and autopsy plan.  Also, afterward, (today to be exact) they did solve for cause of death.  It was a heated debate, which was wonderful!  5 out of 8 students came to a correct conclusion. *Snipped a comment about the correct answer.*

Overall, it was a fabulous experience.  I highly recommend it and want to thank all of you who made this possible.

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Still Reading Across America

Posted on March 29, 2006 by Janine Lim

It's the last week in March. The last week before our spring break. And we're still Reading Across America! This morning a middle school class at River Valley Middle School is reading with a class from Chesaning, Michigan. Thanks to Aaron Schippert for finding us a class to connect at the 7:45 class time! The classes are sharing jokes, poems, speeches, and choral readings. We had a bit of a glitch, losing the connection partway through. But we reconnected and kept going!

Then later this morning Brandywine Elementary connected to their partner class in Pennsylvania. This Read Across America session was rescheduled due to weather. We had a few technical issues – bandwidth on our end and audio & PowerPoint issues with Visual Concert on the other end, but the students and teachers handled it well. The class in PA shared a presentation about their reading of the book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Our class shared several stories with jokes in between.

The kids were fourth grade, and our teacher had a great idea. The students stood up half way through the session to stretch and asked the partner class to stretch too. This helped get some of the wiggles out! The classes also asked questions where they said, everyone who likes football, stand up. Students in both classes stood up. A great way to answer questions visually from both sides at the same time!

That's the end of Read Across America for my schools for 2006. Out of 35 sessions, only 2 didn't happen due to weather and the difficulties of rescheduling. Not too bad! Close to 1000 of my local kids participated this year! I think that's a record for our RAA participation!

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Tips for International VC Calls

Posted on March 29, 2006 by Janine Lim

I've been working on test calls with Pakistan, Peru, and Costa Rica in the last couple days. Here are some resources that I've found helpful!

  1. International Country Calling Codes. This neat little site is great for figuring out dialing strings for ISDN calls. Enter your country and the country you're connecting to, and you get the info you need! Very cool.
  2. Timeanddate.com. I've also been working on my NECC sessions, getting some international partners to connect to during my sessions. I've found the Meeting Planner very helpful to figure out which of my international contacts are sleeping during a session and which ones might be available. You just pick the date and the cities and you get a nice spread of times color coded to whcih times will probably work best.

Another thing that is very helpful is to be willing to do test calls and connections at odd times. It's not very fair or gracious for us in the U.S. to expect international sites to accommodate us by coming in outside of school hours to connect. We are connecting to Pakistan for a videoconference on Thursday, and due to the 10 hour time difference, we have to connect early our time and it's still after school late afternoon for them. So when we needed to do a test call, we connected late last night so the test was during the school day their time. That way to make the connection work, both sides have compromised a bit on the time.

I heard this message loud and clear in the international sessions at the Keystone Conference last October. It really is important to work as hard as possible to make the connection as easy as possible for all sides involved. So when planning your international videoconferences, be considerate and thoughtful of your partner school!

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Providing Content For Your Schools

Posted on March 28, 2006 by Janine Lim

This morning I had a conversation with several colleagues in Texas about the 123 VC: Jazzing Up Your Curriculum with Videoconferencing workshop we are planning for this summer. Besides planning the workshop, we had a great conversation about how we support our local buildings and how we promote and encourage the use of videoconferencing. One concern that came up was the need for content. "We have lots of equipment, but we need more content for our schools." The context of this conversation was the discussion of the training materials and activities. This workshop focuses heavily on collaborations between schools. 

I am increasingly convinced that educational service agencies should not only be providing bridging, purchasing, training, and technical support for their schools doing distance learning; they also must be offering content! It takes time to move from a consumer of content to a producer of content, but that should be the ultimate goal for all educational service agencies who seriously want to make distance learning successful in their service area. Schools need lots of free simple first experiences with videoconferencing to get them started.

Some great examples of service agencies or district distance learning coordinators offering content are Macomb ISD's ASK, LAPS and  RegionQuest programs; Joan Roehre's KUSD, Wisconsin History Mystery; Kathy Mohr's NOECA, OH Chapters, Classmaters, and other projects; and Linda McDonald's creative projects in Katy, TX (see Documents on her page). 

Andrea Israeli, NY, blogged about the challenges of producing content last week. It's definintely a challenging task, but oh so worth it! It gives your teachers high quality free content! You may also want to browse my blog entries about our ASK programs (which we learned how to do from Macomb ISD) and our MysteryQuest programs.

Several of the people in our conference call today had taken my Planning Interactive Curriculum Connections online class and that was how they began to offer content to their schools. Another session of this class starts on April 17 if you want to join us! I'm also rewriting my Kid2Kid Videconference Connections class this summer for next year. It will be targeted not only to teachers, but also to educational service agencies who want to learn how to run ASK, MysteryQuest, and new projects for their local districts. So keep that in mind if you're interested. I'll advertise it here as well as on the VC listservs in the fall.

Bottom line, if you have done videoconferencing for a year or two, it's time to generate and provide content. Create your own projects based on ideas from others and your curriculum of course! Then fill up those sessions with local classes and classes from the listservs. It's always a wonderful experience for students to interact with classes from far away! You CAN do it! Just jump in and start with something simple!

Filed under: Professional Dev., VC Community | 1 Comment »

Comparing the Tandberg & Polycom MCUs

Posted on March 27, 2006 by Janine Lim

May 21, 2007 Update:  See the latest comments on my bridge here.

Please note this was originally written in May 2006 and versions have changed since then. See the comments section for TANDBERG’s response. – Note added March 2007.

First Things First
First before I write about some comparisons, let me describe my base assumptions and biases.

1. My use of videoconferencing is almost totally connecting with
“unmanaged” units, or places outside of my service area. These are
other schools that connect in a myriad of ways, and who don’t
particularly want to be registered to my gatekeeper, because I connect
to them only once or twice a year. Some connect through bridges
(Radvision, Polycom MGCs, old Accords, etc.), some connect directly,
some connect via IP, and some connect via ISDN. Read Across America, MysteryQuest, and other such projects and events are what we do with videoconferencing. Hence
I connect with a ton of unknown units all the time. And I expect that
to work consistently (with a test call ahead of time of course!).

2. As an educational service agency supporting videoconferencing, I
expect my MCU to be able to connect to anything. My goal with my MCU is
to provide services and connections to my districts that they could not
do on their own: multipoint events, IP/ISDN conversion, connections
they can’t make on their own.

And some background. I have 35 (soon to be 70) Polycom endpoints and a Tandberg
MPS (vJ3.0), gateway, gatekeeper and Tandberg Management Suite (TMS). The comparison is with my colleague Arnie Comer‘s
bridge: an Polycom MGC 100 and he supports 140 Tandberg endpoints. We both use our bridges as described above.

This comparison is not on all the features that either bridge can
do, but on the features necessary to support K12 videoconferencing as
described above.

Comparison

  Polycom MGC 100
Software Rev 6.02		 Tandberg MPS
Software Rev J3.0

So I have come to the conclusion that the Polycom MCU is the
workhorse of videoconferencing, connecting all types of units together.
The Tandberg bridge seems to be heading towards a closed network model
with great wonderful fancy features for closed networks. But it does
not handle IP address dialing well at all and the company
doesn’t seem to be designing their systems to support IP address dialing.

Disclosure Statement: Polycom is sponsoring the BCISD Videoconference Program Database. They also link to my blog. However, they do not dictate, edit, or preapprove anything I write here.

Filed under: Techie Stuff | 9 Comments »

Spanish Read Across America

Posted on March 24, 2006 by Janine Lim

This morning Brandywine Elementary is connecting to a Spanish Immersion school in Columbus Ohio for a Spanish version of Read Across America. Our classes have Spanish only once a week, so they aren’t quite as fluent. The classes shared poetry, short statements, and choral readings together, mostly in Spanish. The question and answer part they did in English.

This was the first connection for Brandywine with their new Polycom VSX7000 mobile in the district. This connection was our first over a wireless Internet connection between the elementary school and the high school where the T1 comes in. The quality was amazingly good! Nice to know that this model is going to work well for us!

The other neat thing for my school is that the students in Columbus had done several videoconferences. So they told our students all about the different programs. Great for my school to hear about all the possibilities from students! I love it when schools learn from each other this way!

The Columbus students asked my school what they hope to do with videoconferencing. One of our students said, “I want to connect to you again because it’s very fun to talk to you guys.” Then our students asked them if they wanted to do Flat Stanley together and be pen pals. What a great partnership and first VC for my school!

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How to Talk to Your Vendor

Posted on March 23, 2006 by Janine Lim

A few weeks ago I followed with interest a Megaconference listserv discussion about LifeSize and it’s support of video protocols. Here is a comment by John S. Martin, from the JANET Videoconferencing Management Centre, University of Edinburgh.

When multipointing in a multi-user environment we have found several incompatibility issues which are only resolved when one, or all, of the connected codecs connected at H.261. This is the base standard for H.323 videoconferencing. Yes, a video protocol transcoded conference will overcome this issue, but this uses more resource on an MCU such as a Polycom MGC. I
have spoken to lifesize about this and apparently it was a commercial decision not to implement H.261, but something they may look at in the future, depending on demand.

I just find it bizarre that a company have developed a system which doesn’t connect to H.261/3/4 video protocols.

Usually I’m not thinking much about video protocols, but I was very interested in this conversation. The Megaconference listserv has many international higher ed technicians and I learn a lot just by reading the messages. It was intriguing because some people thought it didn’t matter. Why would a high definition VC product want to connect to a low end legacy product that could only do H.261?

This conversation concerned me, coming from a K12 VC environment where usually there is much less tech support. Some districts have a teacher who is responsible for the videoconferencing equipment, and that’s it! That teacher or media specialist expects the connection to work if it’s IP or ISDN and they usually don’t know anything about the video protocols. It’s enough to remember H.323 or H.320! As K12 endusers, we just want it to work! You want to be able to talk to someone, find out if they have videoconferencing, and have it work!

So I have a few thoughts and reflections based on this experience.

Learn From Others! If you participate in Megaconference or Megaconference Jr., stay on the listserv after the event is over! Even if the conversation seems like it’s way over your head! That’s how I felt when I first participated in Megaconference a few years ago. But I’ve stayed on the listserv and “lurked” and learned a lot about the technical back end details of videoconferencing that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Another good place to learn about technical details is the VTC Talk Forums.

Talking To Your Vendor. If you’re new to videoconferencing and are talking to your vendor, there are some things you should consider. Some of this advice is based on experiences with connecting to other schools for MysteryQuest, Read Across America, and similar projects. 9 times out of 10 your vendor will not have imagined these types of uses of videoconferencing and so may try to convince you otherwise.

1. You definitely need to be able to dial out to an IP address. And if possible, you need a way to get to ISDN sites as well. Not all of the providers have switched to IP yet. And some schools that you might want to connect to are also ISDN. Sometimes your educational service agency (ISD, BOCES, ESC, etc.) can provide this service for you. Or your vendor may have ideas of how you can get access to ISDN if needed. ISDN usage in K12 videoconferencing has diminished greatly in the last year or so, but if you truly want to be able to connect to anyone, you’ll need a way to convert to ISDN occasionally.

2. Second, you really need to be able to receive calls, preferably to an external IP address. There are a few content providers who prefer to call the school they are connecting to. There are also many great projects you can do with other schools. But if you partner up with a school that can only call out, and you can only call out, then you are stuck! This is a big problem in the Read Across America project and spin off projects that use the same format. There are new firewall traversal units coming out to help schools with the challenges of IP videoconferencing. However, sometimes these tools create an environment where you have to dial an extension to get to the right unit. Some schools connect through a bridge, and the bridge can’t dial an extension. All these things complicate projects that should be able to happen easily! So if at all possible, design your system so that you can receive calls to an external IP address. Otherwise, you may need your educational service agency to help you make connections with other schools.

3. Have as little as possible in between your VC unit and the rest of the world. In my experience with IP calls, the more “boxes” (firewalls, gateways, bridges, & stuff) are between two units, the lower the quality of the call. If you are in a consortium, design your system so you can make calls with or without the assistance of a central bridge. It’s good to be independent of that bridge if at all possible. I’m finding that my calls work better and have clearer pictures when connected directly. Some of the newer units can do beautiful H.264 calls that look great! But not all the bridges and gateways and stuff in between allow that protocol through.

H.323 has made videoconferencing cheaper and more accessible to schools, but it has also added a level of complexity to connections that is sometimes hard to navigate. But that’s the nature of the beast these days it seems.

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GNG: Mozambique

Posted on March 23, 2006 by Janine Lim

Today Global Nomads connected three schools from the United States, Texas, New York and Missouri to students in Mozambique. Polycom helped to sponsor this incredible connection.

This videoconference series in March and April of 2006 brings the world’s youth face-to-face with their peers in Mozambique to discuss and learn about their respective cultures. Here are some of the topics that will be discussed during the March and April connections:

  • We are as one (breaking the ice)
  • What are our similarities and differences?
  • Independence and Civil War
  • Gender Issues I
  • Gender Issues II
  • A Wild Elephant
  • What we have Learned

A series of classroom-to-classroom and remote broadcast conferences (with experts speaking from remote onsite locations) provides a collaborative global education experience.

Here are questions asked by students in today’s videoconference:

  1. What is unique about your town, city or country?
  2. What do you do for fun and what are your three (3) favorite bands?
  3. What is your favorite class in school?
  4. Is there a lot of tourism in Mozambique?
  5. Do you have a traditional food?
  6. What kinds of sports do you play in Mozambique?
  7. Who do you think is going to win the World Cup?
  8. What are your favorite movies?
  9. What are your thoughts on child abuse in the US?
  10. What do you think about HIV Aids? (Interesting fact – there are 1 million people in Mozambique with Aids).
  11. What is the one thing you could not live without? Mozambique answer: FAMILY
  12. If you could take a trip anywhere in the world where would you go? Mozambique answer Brazil – Why to see all the pretty girls.
  13. Mozambique asks: What do you think about the show “American Idol” and “Jerry Springer” – Interesting answers.
  14. How is the educational system in the US?
  15. What are your aspirations for the future?
  16. What holiday do you celebrate in Mozambique?
  17. Who are your role models?
  18. What do you think of the legalization of prostitution and drugs in the US?

It was interesting to learn that most of the students in Mozambique can speak at least 4 languages. United States students were entertained by singing and dancing from Mozambique students.

-by Elaine Shuck, Guest Blogger

Filed under: Content Providers, Special Events | Comments Off

ASK: Donuthead

Posted on March 23, 2006 by Janine Lim

“You guys are making me think that I need to think a lot more about what I do!” Sue commented to a student in Dowagiac. One of the neat things about ASK programs is that the students think deeply about the book and come up with very interesting creative questions that often stump the author.

Today’s ASK program features author Sue Stauffacher and her book Donuthead. Donuthead is a hysterically funny book about two kids who don’t fit in and how they deal with life situations. The students followed the ASK process to prepare for this videoconference: reading the book, journalling, and writing and selecting excellent questions. Here is a sampling of some of the questions.

  • Where did you come up with the name Donuthead?
  • Do you know someone who is afraid of everything like Franklin?
  • How do you think Franklin would feel if he found his dad?
  • How did you think of making one side of Franklin longer than the other?
  • How many Donuthead books do you plan on making?
  • How do you help young people who are poor?
  • Why did you make Sarah’s dad mean? Was your dad like that?
  • Why did you make Sarah tough and brave?

Sue Stauffacher is a wonderfully funny author and presenter. It’s incredible to listen to her stories, how she writes, and how she interacts with the students.

In the picture to the right, Sue explains the writing and editing process.

As part of the program this morning, Sue read a few paragraphs from the new book Donutheart which is coming out in October. Many questions this morning are answered in the new book. Clearly students, teachers, and distance learning coordinators alike are anxious to read this sequel!

I’m looking forward to next year when we will do ASK with the Donuthead book as well as Sue’s new book Bessie Smith and the Night Riders, the amazing true story of a blues singer who single handedly scared off the KKK. We’ll be scheduling this one in February for sure.

Filed under: ASK Programs | Comments Off

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