Last week Room 5 children from St Joseph's school, Stratford had their first conversation with the Pitt Island children with Skype & the WebCam. Both classes are using SmartBoards so they got to see each other on the big screen. The quality of transmission during the skype call was good but it was a hit & miss affair to hook up as we kept getting a 'No Proxies' error. Sometimes Skype will deliver your chat messages ages after sending them & show someone as being offline even when they're not. So the key to classroom success for us is to be flexible with your timetabling, send a chat & finally when it comes through, drop everything else you're doing and dial in right away. Children at St Joseph's had prepared a presentation "Our Place" for me to bring to Pitt.
This week we skyped back from Pitt. Our kids had seen the St Joseph's presentation so had a few questions to ask. They have been working on more questions over the last couple of days and are looking forward to seeing Room 5 pop up again soon on the Skype network for another chat. Next week they will be making their "Our Place" presentation for me to take back to NZ with me & share with Room 5
This week we skyped back from Pitt. Our kids had seen the St Joseph's presentation so had a few questions to ask. They have been working on more questions over the last couple of days and are looking forward to seeing Room 5 pop up again soon on the Skype network for another chat. Next week they will be making their "Our Place" presentation for me to take back to NZ with me & share with Room 5
1 comment:
Rachel, would you believe that Skype is blocked in South Australian schools? Something about bandwidth issues, needing to open a separate port but apparently in the too hard basket. With the opportunity afforded by these technologies, global (and local) collaboration options open up - and the interactive whiteboard is a great way to connect classrooms. Just don't try to connect to one in Adelaide...
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