Global Connections #Participate!

From my inbox today - can't find the web version of this mail out so will reproduce here.
If 2014 was the year of the webinar for teachers perhaps 2015 will be the year of global classroom connections? (now teachers are getting more confident).
Get with it teachers so many wonderful learning opportunities for our students and a way to increase their global awareness and understandings. See 'Healing the World One Classroom at a Time' for some excellent reasons why we should reach out beyond our classroom walls & beyond our national borders.

Transform literacy and learning in your classroom Beginning on February 16th 2015, Skype in the Classroom is launching “Skype Celebrates Literacy”. This six week program will feature guest speakers from the publishing industry, lessons and resources to support and inspire literacy learning in classrooms around the world. Literacy remains a high priority on the global education agenda and a core subject for classrooms everywhere. Lessons that involve reading, writing, speaking and listening – from poetry jams and reading aloud to author visits – have always been popular amongst teachers using Skype in the Classroom. In 2014, you and your students travelled millions of virtual miles taking part in lessons around the world via Skype. Whether you collaborated with another classroom, played Mystery Skype, invited a guest speaker in for a Q&A, or went on a virtual field trip, chances are these experiences engaged your students’ literacy skills, perhaps without them even realizing it! Here's how you can get involved: 1) Invite a guest speaker: authors, illustrators and storytellers will be available to join your classrooms via Skype. To make it easy to find and schedule a speaker to inspire your students, we’ve created a way to quickly schedule these calls. These conversations can be scheduled via Skype in the Classroom beginning February 9th. 2) Participate in World Read Aloud Day events: schedule a call on World Read Aloud Day or World Book Day (both the week of 2nd March) to celebrate the art of reading and writing. There will be a wide range of partner-provided content, tools, and resources to help with traditional reading and writing, including digital literacy and internet safety content too. 3) Literacy projects: we will have some very exciting literacy-related partner organizations including School in the Cloud, Microsoft, Safer Internet Day/ChildNet, and some very special guest speakers through those partnerships all coming soon. 4) Create your own Skype lesson: get creative and post your own literacy lesson for other classrooms to get involved in. Let us know about it @SkypeClassroom and we can promote it for you. Using an online Reading Level site, Mike Soskil, a teacher at Wallenpaupack South Elementary School in Pennsylvania discovered that “Our 4th grade students, who have been using a curriculum of Skype experiences and blogging as part of their Social Studies curriculum this year, increased their writing scores on average by half a grade level from October to December. The students using this curriculum are either in special education or low achieving.” With a stronger focus on learning experiences that directly support literacy we hope to help teachers everywhere create even greater impact through the use of free accessible technology like Skype. We hope to see you and your students join in all of the new literacy lessons. If you are new to Skype in the Classroom, we invite you to hop on a tour hosted by our Skype Guides, teachers just like you who are excited to show you the innovative and educational adventures that await your students. Don’t forget to help inspire others with your experience via our Stories Page, Facebook andTwitter. We look forward to a fantastic celebration of literacy. Your friends at Skype in the Classroom education@skype.net @mysteryskype @SkypeClassroom #skype2learn

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Connected Students @ Rosmini College

I have always been a great fan of the work that Geoff Wood is doing with his students at Rosmini College and have written on them often in the VLN Primary School blog (here, here & here). His classroom is truly a Connected Classroom and his students Connected Learners. Geoff is a full time classroom teacher and has 'flipped' his classroom to be revolving around the constant connections that fuel their learning processes, through the sharing and relationships they develop with the many, many different students who come 'virtually' into their classroom everyday. On my second face to face visit in two years i can see now how this has really developed into the culture of the students Years 7 - 13 in Geoff's health classes. They are organised, they are confident, they are patient & persistent (dealing with the technology), they are able to communicate with a diversity of students from new entrants, all over NZ and globally. On the afternoon i was at Rosmini two boys were in the workroom (cupboard?), teaching youngsters in South Auckland about sugars in our diet; another two were on the outside deck talking to students from Te Hapua about online safety & Geoff was preparing an international connection with Bangladesh & Pakistan (?) for later in the day. I was impressed with the ease of communication, through pretty average technology & connections (HD desktop VC it wasn't). It was a joy to watch the students at Te Hapua perform a waiata & haka for the Rosmini boys and then one by one approach the camera to introduce themselves & say thank you.
Below is are some snippets of one of the sessions and a short interview with two of the boys:

Mount SPA – ICTPD workshops

Here are the presentations used in today’s workshops. Please feel free to give me feedback or comments in the comments box below this blog posting. Hope you find it interesting digging a bit deeper into some of these things – let me know how you go with this and add me to your skype contacts :-)

E learning landscape2011

View more presentations from first last.

Skype

View more presentations from first last

The Rainforest Connection

Check out Rainforest Connection. An opportunity for your students to connect to experts in the rainforest of Belize. This is only available until the 25th February. Get onto it now if you are interested!

Coastal Maunga

A view of Taranaki from the Coastal side - not a speck of snow anywhere - an awesome day all around the maunga.

I had my first visit this year to Coastal School today. Coastal is unique as it is an area school with students from New Entrants right through to Year 13 (K1 - 12). It is great to be in a school where i may have a chance to work with the younger students again.

I met with Coastal VC students, a group of four Y11 taking Accounting, another taking Chemistry L2 & another Chemistry L3. They seem to have gotten off to a great start they couldn't tell me of any concerns they had. So just to make sure they were prepared for any eventualities i ran them through a few 'what if' scenarios to do see what they would do... All of these students say that having a class website with all their course work, notes & activities is really helpful especially when they may miss a VC from time to time. It is something that some of our own eteachers need to develop more fully and we also need to provide a better webspace for them to do that.
Joel our Coastal eteacher has developed his own website to deliver his own course content. A lot of work has gone into this site to prepare resources in a range of formats Keynote, PowerPoints, Flash & Podcasts and he is really happy to share these with anyone who visits his site. One thing i would say about this site is that it is static - a repository for the delivery of material, though there is a feedback form. There are no features for interaction here, such as bulletin boards, chat, IM. Having said that interaction around this class takes place in other forms - the weekly VC, emails, phone calls, & skype. We spent some time today looking at getting skype to work at school - we had the right settings from Telecom SchoolZone FAQs, i could get it working on my own computer but noone else could. Has anyone else had problems working skype through their school network - what are we not doing right?
I spent some time with Hamish, Coastal elearning lead teacher. Hamish gets a days release each week to lead elearning initiatives within the school and to work with teachers integrating ICTs in the classroom. Wahoo that would be a good thing for all our lead teachers :-) I am looking forward to my return visit so we can plan how i can best support him in this role.

Classrooms' Connecting

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

IWB @ Pitt

Pitt Island school installed their Smart Board yesterday and the kids have had lots of fun exploring the cool things they can do with it. We ran a test skype today to see how a skype call would go projected on the IWB. The picture on the big screen was fine but sound at our end was a problem with the children so far away from the camera and the laptop - perhaps bring the laptop closer and attach a better microphone. Some adjustments to be made. Pitt children can expect some skype calls from Taranaki soon as two of our schools are getting webcams to use with their IWBs and will be looking for someone to test them out on too. If your class has a webcam & would like to talk to our Taranaki or Pitt Island children let me know & we will set something up.

Lets Hit the Beach......

It was too nice a day to be at school today & apart from Tania and I continually pleading to take all the kids to the beach we instead sat down in different parts of the school and Skyped each other. So Marco School is ready to roll with Skype & waiting for Pitt Island to have their internet connection fixed so we can continue the conversation from a few weeks ago. Come on ICONZ get it fixed! Did you know if you are a school with the ICONZ internet satellite service and wanting to webconference you can contact ICONZ (with 24 hours notice) and have your bandwidth boosted for the day. That was news to me, even having worked with these schools for the last 4 years! If there are any schools who would like to make a skype connection with Marco please contact me or Jen to organise something.
Today I also helped Jen set up a flickr account for Marco School and set up juploader to make it really easy for her to resize and upload their photos in one hit. Next time i go back i will show her some of the cool tools you can use with your flickr account. Marco School is here on flickr.
Another thing i have been trying to do & just this minute worked it out, is accessing their school server remotely. All i need to do is put in their Static IP address, system administrator user name & password and i'm in. What i'd like to know how to do now is to manage the desktops off the server remotely so i can do some PD at a distance. Any advice on remote control of desktops in the smartnet server environment would be appreciated :-)
We achieved lots @ Marco today but still it was a better day to be @ the beach....

I Can & I Will & They Did

"I Can & I Will" was my mantra this morning as i struggled to get Marco School connecting with Pitt Island School through a skype vidcam call. Did i say just the other day that skyping was easy? Ha ha not on a school network. I knew i would have some setting up to do but could i get it to work - well yes i could 3 hours later! I should have thought to turn off the server firewall in the first instance but no that was the last thing i thought of. We did eventually change the settings on the firewall instead of turning it off totally - so all set for the next time. Our kids used that setup time (in both our schools) to research about each other on the internet. In that time also our kids had taken photos around the school and uploaded them to picturetrail.com where the Pitt Island children were able to view them and leave comments. Our kids were really excited to be talking to the Pitt Island kids so far away though they did need some instruction on VC etiquette - not shouting, or talking all at once or saying things you shouldn't as everyone can hear you... We chatted for a little while and the kids introduced themselves but a short while in the audio on the classroom connection degraded so badly that we had to call it a day. A bit of a rocky start but all keen for another skype next week but this time on the school office computer which for some reason?? provides clearer picture & sound. In the meantime I hope our Marco kids will be updating their blogs and maybe have a few comments going around them :-)

Skype Away the Distance

"the tyranny of distance didn't stop the pioneers" It didn't then & it certainly doesn't now - how easy it is to hook in with someone thru Skype (once i had worked out how to turn my headset on - yeah right i think i will look for a camera with a built in mike) Had a good yarn with Rick from Pitt Island today. We talked about loads of things for ages. I've been looking for another rural remote school to hook up with our Marco kids. So meeting Rick @ conference last week was a lucky find though i did plan to track him down and set up something between our two schools. I will be out at Marco regularly over the coming weeks so will get the ball rolling. I know our kids are going to love this :-)
A little bit of ICTPD distance learning happening in our skype conversation today. Learning how to capture a screen shot. Here's the one i took.
Rick's kids will be doing some work with powerpoint, art & animation soon so here's a link to my delicious powerpoint tag. You might need to revisit this link as i am still in the process of gathering resources that seem to be scattered all over the web. delicious is a great way to organise them & find them again.