One of my districts in our RUS grant has 7 buildings with new videoconferencing equipment. The district is spread out and has fiber connecting all but one of their buildings. So they’ve started off with simple connections between buildings. Having the middle school students read to elementary students, etc. They are having so much fun [...]
Filed under: Collaborations | Tagged: RUS Grant | Comments Off
This morning Galien Elementary is connecting to The Cleveland Insitute of Music for the Let’s Go to the Show program. This program is one of my favorites for Kindergarten students. You clear the floor and students learn about high and low, loud and soft, fast and slow, and other simple musical concepts. The program is [...]
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Since we received the Polycom RSS (on loan from Polycom for Polycom special events), I’ve had some ideas for how we could use it. One was to record the PD sessions I do for teachers. That way when I can’t do a VC for others, they can at least access an archive. So today I [...]
Filed under: Professional Dev. | Tagged: Streaming | 4 Comments »
Yesterday we hit a milestone for our RUS grant. All 35 units are now up and running and tested in all the buildings. The last two buildings had serious networking issues to be resolved. We do have a few buildings that are locked down to 128K due to bandwidth issues within the district network, but [...]
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Last week in a post about dialing challenges, I mentioned the issue of ports and firewalls. Different vendors use different ports and if you have your firewall set up for one vendor you might not be able to connect to the next vendor. So when I was meeting with our tech support from AVI Systems, [...]
Filed under: Techie Stuff | 13 Comments »
Just a quick note for those of you who are participating in Read Around the Planet this year. We’ve been running some preliminary matches with the requests already in the system and it’s looking really good for the English matches. TWICE is using a new database this year and the computer will be matching everyone. [...]
Filed under: Collaborations | 1 Comment »
Have you seen the new Distance Learning insert in USA Today? If not, it’s online in PDF format at the USDLA website. It’s mostly about online learning, but there’s a bit about VC too including pictures. Check it out!
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My online class, Planning Interactive Curriculum Connections starts January 22 and runs four weeks. This class is always a wonderful experience of networking with others interested in videoconferencing. We’d love to have you join us! Read all about it and how to register here.
Filed under: Professional Dev. | Comments Off
Here’s a nice little blurb from Tech4Learning about cross platform (Mac to PC) desktop videoconferencing. Another option the teachers could pursue is using the commercial software Trillian Pro on the Windows-side. Users of Trillian Pro can videoconference directly with Macintosh users running iChat AV videoconferencing software. Did you know that? It was new to me. [...]
Filed under: Desktop VC, Resources | 1 Comment »
Today I met with our tech support from AVI Systems. While I was gone, they upgraded my Tandberg MPS MCU and Gateway, worked on some weird issues I was having, and worked on getting our Tandberg gatekeeper connected to GDS. I’m really pleased with the work they accomplished over the break. I have to say [...]
Filed under: Techie Stuff | Comments Off
