At NECC 2008, I interviewed Linda McDonald from Katy ISD, TX about her latest videoconference project format, the Novel Project. You can see the resources for this program online here
If the YouTube video below is blocked for you, try this link to the same video on TeacherTube.
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One of my goals at NECC has been to continue exploring my latest dream to get VC in every classroom in a couple of my districts who want it on their interactive whiteboards. You can read about my initial thoughts from April here.
Promethean
I started by spending almost an hour chatting with a couple of folks at the Promethean booth. So far (I think), all my districts that have interactive boards in all the classrooms are using Promethean. It seemed to be the place to start. Luckily, the first guy I talked to knew what H.323 videoconferencing was and understood content providers, projects, etc. Yeah!
This was a great conversation and I know it will continue. They also suggested poking around the Promethean Planet site to see if any other Promethean users are working on this. I plan to soon.
Polycom
The next challenge I knew we had to think about is the networking. If we can do the H323 software, camera and audio for under $500, there may be a little extra $$ to solve the networking issues. Obviously we can’t NAT a PVX computer that is used all day in the classroom for other uses as well. It needs to be inside the firewall and secure. So, how do we solve the security issue and have all those units online and connect to each other and outside the network? I talked to the sales engineers at the Polycom booth. It seems the solution is the V2IU firewall traversal unit. The units could dial out and then use our bridge for when others need to dial to them. In one of my district, they have say around 100 ish classrooms. My understanding from our discussion is that we could get the lowest end V2IU for 3M outgoing bandwidth – that’s how it’s sold. $2200 ish list price. The 3M would get us about 9ish 384K calls at the same time, which seems plenty so far.
I also asked the sales engineer about the audio. I’d really like to have Polycom room quality audio hooked up to the PVX if possible. I wonder if this SoundStation plus Computer Calling Kit would work. Need to try it out.
TANDBERG
Next I thought I’d see what Tandberg thought about the idea. The sales engineer that I talked to thought that the Movi solution would be best, which requires a server and a VPN connection between the endpoint and the server. It’s actually using SIP, so you’d need a box to convert SIP to H323 to connect to content providers and other schools for collaborative projects etc like we’re used to. He couldn’t get me a range of costs as Movi doesn’t have a set cost – you have to call and get a quote.
This made me realize that the networking is really the big issue. Interestingly, the sales engineer I talked to at Tandberg thought that SIP was starting to take over the H323 market share. That scared me; but I guess change is the only constant when you’re in technology. I don’t see it coming to education any time soon, but have you noticed how your newer codecs have stuff about SIP in the settings?
Open Source
I’ve been wondering too if this would work with opensource – like XMeeting or Ekiga. It’s true I’ve had varied experience with these, but it’s a place to start. I have been able to get both to connect to my Tandberg bridge. I asked Polycom if the V2IU would support whatever H323 device was behind it and the answer was yes. Tandberg sales engineer didn’t think using open source was a good idea. So it’s something to experiment with and see if it would work or not.
Next Steps
The Promethean guy I talked to was really excited about the possibilities and seemed really interested in making it happen. I think it’s likely we’ll try out a couple pilot classrooms next year and get the teachers to play with it to see how it goes and what issues we run into. I have two teachers in two of our middle schools who did a 6 week collaborative project with each other last year. Both will have Promethean boards in their classrooms, so I think we can try out some of these configurations and have them connect to each other and content providers next year and see how it works.
At NECC 2008, Tonya and Lisa from GNG shared a little overview of their programs.
If the YouTube video below is blocked for you, try this link to the same video on TeacherTube.
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Have you seen this Teachers’ Guide to Videoconferencing done by Athena in the UK? It’s really great!!
There are sections on:
It has a nice friendly design with nice little animations. Some summer exploring for you.
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Thank you again to everyone who has taken the time to either take my research survey or forward/promote it with your local videoconference coordinators/site managers. We’re up to 290 responses now.
I need 100 more responses! I know the end of year is busy crazy for you, but please find a moment or two to support my research and take the survey or remind your local coordinators.
To tantalize you, here are some interesting results so far.
Videoconference Coordinator’s Position:
| Media specialist / librarian |
|
18% | |||||
| Media aide |
|
2% | |||||
| Paraprofessional |
|
2% | |||||
| Principal / Administrator |
|
3% | |||||
| Secretary |
|
0% | |||||
| Teacher |
|
17% | |||||
| Technology specialist |
|
34% | |||||
| District videoconference coordinator |
|
4% | |||||
|
|
|||||||
|
|
Videoconference Support
| Do you receive videoconference support (technical, content and/or training) from a consortium or educational service agency (BOCES, BOE, DOE, ESC, IU, ISD, RESA, LEA, etc.)? |
| Yes |
|
59% | |||||
| No |
|
41% |
Grant Funding
| Did your school receive grant funding for videoconference programming? |
| Yes |
|
27% | |||||
| No |
|
73% |
You can also view the status report by states/countries and by educational service agencies. Thanks again for your time and support of this important research.
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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?Some of the funny word differences that we really laughed about were:
Some of the questions they asked us were:
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.
Filed under: Collaborations, General, International VCs | Comments Off
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:
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!
Filed under: Collaborations, General, International VCs | 2 Comments »
This morning one of my lucky classes is connecting to one of the KC3 programs as part of the competition. Our class is one of the test audiences.
This program is on the Mound Builders and is presented by a school in Oklahoma. Their program included a Moodle site with activities. All of our students got accounts in their Moodle site to participate in the pre activities. I didn’t get to see this, but from what I heard it worked out great.
The videoconference started off with the students in OK asking questions of our students in MI, some of which referred to conversations they’d had ahead of time in Moodle. They talked about the weather, driving to Chicago, sports, snow-mobiling etc.
Dr. Dirt, the lead presenter from OK, drew a name out of a bucket, and threw a t-shirt to Amanda, one of our students. He threw it at the camera, and our teacher threw it to the student. Very funny. The kids really laughed. The t-shirt had the numbers of the student presenters in their basketball team.
After the preliminaries, the students in OK gave a little geography lesson on their state and then moved into the presentation. It included some live presentation from the students, visuals in a PowerPoint, and a taped interview with a local expert on Native Americans. After the video, our students had an opportunity to ask questions, but they didn’t have any.
Next, students learned about excavations and looting that has happened at one of the mounds nearby. After this, the students divided into three groups already assigned. Within those groups, a person was assigned to be the mapper, the reporter, and the excavator. They had planned to have a jello mold at our site, but it wouldn’t set. So they had to improvise and show the students their jello mold on the document camera. The activity helped students see how excavators and archaeologists map and document everything they find as they carefully excavate.
After this activity, our students talked to the archaeologist who was in the taped interview before and learned about how the jello mold activity is similar to an archaeologist’s actual work. He also talked about what he had learned about the Native Americans who lived in Oklahoma based on his work and research.
After a little blip in the technology, another student shared additional information on how the Spiro people lived along with pictures of artifacts found in one of the mounds. The neat thing about student presentations is the extra humor and interesting questions interspersed throughout the program.
After we got reconnected, the conference went down again due to scheduling on the TN bridge that’s recording this for the KC3 competition. Considering the stresses of the technology, the students in OK did a great job in just keeping on! Our class liked it enough to stick around even though there were difficulties.
At the end, our students asked several questions about the mound builders. Then the OK students asked our kids if they could do a virtual field trip for them and what it could be on. I think it was a stunning question for the kids on our end. But they started to brainstorm some ideas on Michigan. To close, our kids said thank you and all the presenting students got on camera and waved.
This was a neat connection. You could tell the students had built a bit of a relationship ahead of time in Moodle and that definitely made a difference in the interactions, especially at the beginning. I look forward to seeing the results of the KC3 program.
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Last week Andrea asked me about my Christmas holiday. She remembered the castle trip from last year. Well this year, we stayed home and I read a lot. But I did have some family-&-friends-fun-time too! We made a gingerbread castle and you can see the pictures here. My sister-in-law got me started on this hobby and you can see other projects we’ve done too. Enjoy!
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Tips & thoughts & insights from this discussion/groups.
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