Category Archives: Skypecast

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A Grace – Full Visit

Update: 4/29/07
Find a link to the podcast below (my first ever podcast btw).
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Friday, Grace Corrigan “graced” our classroom with a visit, and that might seem like just a cute play-on-words, but if you had been there you would agree. Grace is Christa McAuliffe’s Mom (Teacher in Space tragically lost on the Space Shuttle Challenger debacle). I was told to expect her about fifteen minutes after school started and she appeared about fifteen minutes before school started, so much for my, “We’ll get the students in and settled first” plan. But it didn’t matter. They came in and found their seats, some said hello – I had explained to them the day before that because we were Skyping her visit and trying to record it and video tape it, that I would be busy and they would have to monitor themselves and each other – they did a great job!
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Lee Baber and I (mainly Lee) got the Skype connection to work – we had planned on meeting over Skype the day before to check the connection and discuss what to expect etc. –  but both of us were so busy that that never happened. We did manage to connect about an hour before, after I managed to interrupt another Skype session her students were doing.

We had a bit of a tentative start, I intro-ed from my end and then one of Lee’s students did an intro for the podcast they were doing – and Grace was off – well for a few minutes anyhow. Right as Grace was engaging the students, our school’s morning announcements began. But that didn’t stop Grace, she just kept on going right through – today’s lunch menu, Thought-for-the-Day, and a scolding for leaving too much trash outside after, “outside lunch” the day before. I noticed at this point that Lee had sent me a text message on Skype, “Brian, we seem to be picking up some kind of noise; what is that? “Just morning announcements,” I texted back. “Oh,” replied Lee, who I’m sure was really impressed at this point at the professional manner in which the presentation was going. And that impression was reinforced a few minutes later when the office called me over the loudspeaker to tell me to do my attendance (even though it was done). You have to understand that we complain all the time how loud things come across our PA system, but there is no way to adjust it or turn it off.

Anyhow, undeterred Grace continued – she showed them a short film about Christa and continued on her theme of  “Reach For The Stars!” She took questions for about 25 minutes, took a photo with the class, shook hands with any student that wanted to, autographed a picture of Christa for us, and was gone. I scanned the picture and printed out a color copy for every student in my class. 18 of my students were able to ask her a question, and at least half that number of the YouthBridges students asked a question too.

I want to thank Grace Corrigan, Lee Baber and her students and Paul McFarlane a high school English teacher that started and runs the Lumiere Film Festival – and he teaches our school district’s Digital Video Class with me – he chose my class as the one for Grace to visit.
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My class began blog posts about the experience and their field trip the day before to Animal Ark. Lee emailed me that she thinks the recording went well – thanks to her and her students. All-in-all a super experience for all involved. As soon as the podcast is edited I’ll put a link to it here. Once I get a chance to edit the video, and if it is any good I’ll post it. I just wish Celest could have been a part – a few students mentioned that too.

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Podcast – Click here for podcast of Grace’s visit.

Recorded 4/27/07 Length: 31:51

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Christa McAuliffe’s Mom, Grace Corrigan Visiting My Classroom Friday!!!

Update Friday Afternoon: We did make it work and it was great! (Thanks Lee!!) Picture(s) and more in awhile.

Friday morning Grace Corrigan, Christa McAuliffe’s mom (Teacher in Space on the Challenger Space Shuttle) will be in my classroom speaking to and with my students and answering their questions. In addition, Lee Baber’s YouthBridges students will be Skyping in from Virginia, and hopefully others will as well. Lee and I have been trying to work out all the logistics without actually managing to communicate with each other, which is always very exciting. I wasn’t able to let her know if we were really on until Wednesday night and then I was gone all day Thursday on a field trip  the 3 hour time difference doesn’t help, but I’m confident we will make it work… make it work … make it work …

We are trying to videotape her visit and to record the audio for a podcast. If I can manage to post how you can be part of this I will but chances are it will be very last minute. I can tell you it will start about 9:15am PDT. You might find out how to be part of the Skype on the YouthBridges site.

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Youthbridges Audio Skype Interview Experience Podcast

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Ten days ago we had the opportunity to link up for an interview with the 8th grade students in Lee Baber’s class at YouthBridges in Virginia. The participants included Lee’s class, my class in Sparks, Nevada – Elderbob Brannan in Texas, and Celest (a student in my class that has leukemia and attends class via video Skype) from her house. We were scheduled to begin at 9:30am Pacific time, but everytime we all got on … the Skype call dropped. Lee finally figured out that it happened every time Celest Skyped in – so she just Skype called her – I got her Celest’s phone number and Lee called it using Skype – problem solved. This was not terribly interesting for my students – but was a great lesson for them how things don’t work and you problem solve (or at least try) and just maybe you get things to work. Elderbob has posted the interview as a podcast if you’d like to hear it.

Update: Lee Baber has posted the podcast at YouthBridges too.
Lee’s students had written questions and sent them to us days before the interview so that my students could consider answers beforehand. This should have worked well, and it did, just not in the way I expected. Most of my students are second language learners and one of the things we have REALLY been working on is understanding a question before you try to answer it – ask about what you don’t understand. My students did not do a good job of this and they realized this after the interview when we de-briefed about it. They felt the questions were hard to understand – and I asked them why they didn’t notice that beforehand … they finally realized it was because they didn’t think about the questions deeply enough when we went over them in class and it wasn’t obvious to them until afterwards when they knew they had had difficulties answering them.

This is true “Messy” learning. Now I can remind them and “beat them over the head” with what happened and they will have the schema to know what I am referring to and hopefully become better thinkers – and this is just about as important a skill as I can think of – being aware of what I know and don’t know which is such a common issue with elementary students and even more so with kids of poverty and second language learners like my students. They will also be able to notice themselves that they have improved and that awareness is key. Lee and I have already talked about another possible Skype discussion and I hope we really mange to follow through so my students (and hers) can use what they learned from this experience.

Elderbob’s audio recording will be something we can go back to as a benchmark – what was good and what wasn’t. We already have reaped the benefits of this experience. We have been working for quite awhile on stories about being our shoes for an entire day. This week we read them aloud to the class and we reminded ourselves about how much easier it is to listen and enjoy an oral presentation when it is read with feeling. They did a great job.

We’d like to thank Lee and her students at Hillyard Middle School and Elederbob Brannan for getting us together.

I am posting below the debrief notes my class recorded immediately after the interview:

What was hard?

Set-up took a long time – tech issues. Made it boring at first.

Hard to hear.

We were just sitting and listening.

Not that many questions and the questions were hard to understand.

Too long between questions – dead air

What went well?

The Youthbridges students got it to work!Lots of students got to say something.

New way to use Skype – more than one person.

Got to talk about something good we have done.

We got to learn about other people in other states.

The experience of getting to talk to people we don’t know.

Felt like people were interested in something we had to say.

What could we do to improve the experience?

Work on giving more detailed answers, more articulate – explain more. People will find that more interesting to listen to.

Be more willing to answer – just try.

Speak-up – talk louder.

Think more about the questions and ask about what we don’t understand – ask for clarification. Give more thoughtful answers. This would make it less boring – be active thinkers/learners.

Have a better way to get students to the microphone more quickly.

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YouthBridges Interview Via Skype

Lee Baber’s students from YouthBridges will be interviewing my students Thursday from J. Frank Hillyard Middle School in Virginia. We’ll be using Skype and may be joined by others from various locales. They’ll turn this into a podcast – I’ll let you know where as soon as I know where it will be available. Lee and I did a test run this morning and things seemed to work fine. The one unknown is whether or not Celest will be able to join us, she has been a bit under the weather of late, but she seems to think she’ll be ready for this.

My class spent time today thinking about possible answers to the questions we were sent.  This is a great opportunity for my fourth graders to practice expressing themselves. Since most of my class are second language learners giving more than short answers is a weakness, so I really appreciate the opportunity this gives them – we can even listen to ourselves later and critique how we did.

More later.

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Skype Web Site Blocked – But Not Skype – I Can’t Wait To Find Out Why!

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Last week part of each my 3 presentations at The Nevada Education Technology Leadership Conference was about Skype audio and video-conferencing. So this week I got emails from a teacher in my district wondering how I bypassed school district filters to use it. To make a long story short what I eventually realized was that the Skype web site is blocked by the school district (it wasn’t as late as January the last time I downloaded Skype to a computer at school) but using Skype is not blocked. If you already have the software installed you can get out – no problem. So I just found the teacher an alternate site to download the software – but I haven’t heard back yet to see if she has been successful.

We tried to figure out why access to the Skype web site would be blocked. The only idea we had was that IT is afraid of the impact of having “too many” teachers Skypeing (whatever that threshold is).

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Nevada Education Technology Leadership Conference

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Update 2-28 / 10:30pm
Link to my conference Wiki.

This weekend is our state technology conference. Ian Jukes is the keynote speaker Saturday. From the conference website:

The theme of this year’s conference, Technology: The Great Connector , suggests the wide range of influence technology has on learning. Sessions and workshops will reflect this. Topics will include –
Connecting to Curriculum: student use of technology in design: robotics, art, buildings; integration of technology resources into classroom activity
Connecting to Leadership: preventing student plagiarism (defining it and preventing it through use of online websites such as turnitin.com), implementation of technology plans; becoming “highly qualified”
Connecting to Creativity: student productions (yearbook, newspaper, etc), innovative uses of PowerPoint, ActivBoards, and other tools.
Connecting to Each Other: blogging, using online resources such as think.com

I’m doing 2 presentations – a 60 minute presentation Saturday called “Tales From A Model Technology Classroom” (the classroom is a model – we might get there later). And Sunday I’m doing 2 hours on “Blogging and Other Web 2.0 Goodies.” I’m hoping to have a wiki for both presentations done in the next few days.

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Inclusion Update 2-19-07

This week was the best yet for Skypeing Celest into class. Last week she Skyped-in a total of maybe an hour and a half (there are other issues besides leukemia I can’t share – think poverty and ALL that goes with that). But this week she spent all day Monday with us and almost all day Tuesday and Wednesday. Wednesday was Valentine’s Day, Celest had sent hers in with her little sister, so as we passed them out students made a pile in front of her on the computer and we turned the camera around so she could see the goings on. A student from her table group read a few of them to her, then we sent the rest home unopened with sis at the end of the day.

Three days a week is going to be our schedule I think – she gets chemo on Thursdays and that wipes her out for Friday, so that’s going to probably be the norm. She hangs in pretty well with us unless she needs extra attention – that is sometimes difficult because of sound issues. I might have to get her headphones with a built in microphone – background noises at her house often lock-up the sound intermittently – that and the inconsistency at times of our connection. Sometimes we lose her about every 20 minutes or so – the students in her table group just seamlessly reconnect (takes about 10 – 30 seconds) and we just keep going. I do sometimes help her with things while the rest are at recess.

I mentioned in an earlier post that local TV news came and did a story about what we are doing – the one day that the connection was horrible of course – I did give them a copy of our vidcast on digital tape, so it will be interesting to see if they use any of the scenes from our video. They are broadcasting the story Tuesday night. They have given me permission to record and stream from our web site so I’ll let you know when that is available.

This week we will only see her Tuesday and Wednesday because of the holiday and next week we have CRT testing all week – but then most of our testing is done.

I shared with the class many of your comments from our video post – I really had to work hard to impress on them just how important and groundbreaking and just generally cool what they are involved in is. They get it to a point, but this is becoming just one of the things we do, kind of a regular part of the day after three weeks – so they’ve “been there done that.” When my class four years ago made such an impact with our “Don’t Laugh At Me” video, that class got tired of the attention they received. Someone would come to give them “another award” and I would have to talk to them for 20 minutes or more before the presentation about being gracious recipients. I guess it’s a fourth grade thing?

Many have asked me to post updates like this one from time to time and I will.

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So Our Goal Was To Make A Difference With Web 2.0 – Will We Succeed?

As someone who embraced technology as a learning tool early on (my first classroom computer was a 64K Apple ll – not even a lle) I’m right there with many in the edblogosphere that have come to the conclusion that the snails pace of adoption by many in education would be enhanced if we had many examples of it truly making a difference in schools. My class has now successfully included a student that cannot attend school because of her leukemia twice using FREE video Skype software (see here and here). Our plan is to do it as many days as she feels up to it. And beyond the obvious implications of that, what needs to be pointed out is that it was EASY. Beyond getting her a DSL line and computer, which took the better part of 2 months, setting up the Skype connection literally took less than half an hour at her house and our classroom combined. My fourth graders that came into this year having close to zero experience with technology beyond video games and phones, hook up the laptop and web cam we use easily after we did it ONE TIME (we’ve done it twice more since).

Will this make a difference in Celest’s life? The rest of my students’ lives? Others’ lives? Does this project have implications for web 2.0 beyond what we are trying to accomplish here (including someone)? Besides using Skype my students have already used Flickr, blogged, used email, word processed, used digital still and video cameras and planned a video about this experience – and we have only been doing it for 3 days. The exciting thing is we will experience the answers to these questions. More as it unfolds.

Learning is messy!

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Skyping Celest – Day One – The Whole Story

Wednesday

We couldn’t begin first thing in the morning because we had the NAEP test to do – one last obstacle to get over before we could try our grand experiment. The plan was to wait until after lunch and then connect-up (Skype-up?) for the first time. Fortunately, I had Celest ring us up as soon as the class went to lunch – this turned out to be one smart move because when we clicked on our video buttons our image came up right away but the image from her end was black. I tried the few things I could think of, all the time repeating to myself, – but it worked flawlessly twice last night!!!?

I had 25 minutes before eager students would return from lunch, so after checking out with administration I zipped over to her house. The problem? There were at least ten applications open. Windows – their only experience was with Windows – and I hadn’t had a chance to brief them about everything the night before. They closed applications by clicking the windows closed not realizing that that did not close the application on a Mac. I restarted the computer and made the return trip.

At 12:30 video cameras were revved up to catch the event from 2 angles. Students tried hard to settle, but most were on their knees in their chairs hardly able to contain themselves. To begin I projected the image onto our Whiteboard. A ring sounded, I clicked the green phone icon and then the video button and in a matter of seconds Celest, who had shown up on my daily attendance since October, entered our classroom for the first time.

Hellos and waves were exchanged all around – I pivoted the web cam around to each table in the room so all could be introduced. Faces beamed. Now what?

I disconnected the laptop from the Activboard and moved it and the web cam I had taped to the top of a tripod to the front table – the students there gladly made room for their new classmate. I pointed the web cam at the board and had paper distributed all around (including Celest) – Yes I know – why are we using paper when we have laptops and Celest obviously has a computer to work on? Composing on a computer takes some getting used to, we will get there, but we’re not there yet.

I connected my Mac to the ActivBoard and started a pre-write brainstorm about our experience. I adjusted the camera angle once so Celest could see clearly and she followed along with the session easily. After the brainstorm we all wrote a rough draft and then word processed them on our computers. At one point Celest got my attention and wondered if it was OK if she went to the bathroom – how cool is that, she felt like she was at school! I reluctantly allowed her to go (couldn’t she have done that during lunch? : ) Our school counselor, Ann Marlow, who made most of the calls that made this happen – including making the connection that got us the new iMac, walked through and said her hellos and noted the writing everyone was doing – she was both relieved and thrilled this was finally happening.

1st-day

When Celest let me know she was done typing I talked her through spell checking and some other editing pieces, and then led her through emailing her file to me at school. This became her first post on our blog.

About then it was time for us to go to the library, so we said goodbye to Celest since library would take us to the end of the day. And, after many goodbyes of course, our first Video Skype experience was over.

Thursday, Celest attended for a bit more than an hour – she practiced her multiplication facts online with the rest of us and did some reading before she went off for chemo. She paid us a quick visit on her way home just before dismissal – mask on, no wig – she couldn’t make it today – we understand why. Monday will be a fresh day – except that we have ITBS testing all morning – all week, so it will be afternoons only.

We storyboarded our video about our experience today using the Flipchart software in ActivStudio, we will try to finish shooting it and editing it next week with Celest’s help – if so I will post the video for all to see. The students came up with some great ideas.

Learning is messy!