links for 2008-10-19

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  (tags: books software photography scrapbooking)

Collaboration with Schools Around the World

We all know that collaboration and communication are 21st century skills. We all want to incorporate these skills. What pushes us? What holds us back? What works? What seems to stall?

At the beginning of this year (January 2008), I wrote a blog post titled Collaboration Projects- Doomed to fail? that drew many comments.  I was presenting the issues I was facing regarding arming global collaboration projects at my school as the following:

Lack of interest and participation efforts from my school’s teachers in order to participate in existing global collaboration projects.

Not being able to find willing and committed classroom teachers from other schools to work collaboratively on an idea or project envisioned by our school.

It was very frustrating not being able to pursue what I felt was a win win situation for our teachers and students. Connecting them via technology to others like them around the world… Global awareness…collaborative technology tools… living and breathing 21st century skills at its best. Why was I running into obstacles/resistance?

Well, it looks like that (lack of ) patience on my part was playing a factor in the equation. Without really changing much and continuing to find, offer, and present opportunities to my teachers, it looks like we are off to a great start this school year.

Continuing to be enthusiastic about the possibilities… continuing to look for a partner-teacher at other schools around the world…and continuing to offer my help and support in the initial stages are essential ingredients… Not giving up when a collaboration-relationship fizzles out.

What are our objectives for those first “baby-steps” collaborative projects together?

• Organize a schedule between two schools
  • Start and ending of school years (Northern/Southern Hemisphere)
  • Time Zones favorable to live video conferences?
  • Busy school calender/holidays/report cards/field trips
• Collaborative web based tools
  • blogs
  • wikis
• Video Conferences
  • technical aspect
  • social aspect for students
• Getting to know the teachers, students and country of partner school
• Create an atmosphere of trust and “reality” for our students
• Importance of ability/awareness to work and learn with others, separated through geographic and cultural distance/difference
• Awareness how small our planet has become, borders are blurring and disappearing

I have met the most amazing computer teacher this summer while in Argentina. Heidi M. teaches in the Elementary school of the German Goethe Schule in Buenos Aires. We have had some great conversations while I was visiting the school and she took off like a meteor. She was able to hook her 6th grade class AND their English teachers up with our 6th graders.

With a shared google document, we have planned video conferences between the two schools, are working on a wiki together, where each group of students will upload information about their own country to teach the others. The conferences have been helpful to find out WHAT kind of information the counterpart are interested in learning about.

Heidi blogged and uploaded images of the Skype conferences here and here.

Students are creating short video clips in Microsoft Photo Story  and MovieMaker about different aspects of their daily lives to be uploaded to a shared Wiki. We are also in the process of creating and uploading survey questions that bother groups of students will be answering and interpreting the results with their respective math teachers.

Another opportunity for possible collaboration presented itself last week, while I was in Lima, Peru. I had “found” Tatiana U. at the end of last school year on a SmartBoard Ning Network. Once I learned that she was teaching at a bilingual school in LIma, Peru, I contacted her to let her know that our school would be studying about her country and if she were interested in collaboration. Tatiana teaches Pre-School (yes, 4 year olds) at the Saint George school in Lima. We met the Sunday morning when Tatiana took us out for an incredible breakfast before we headed back to the United States in the early afternoon. We had brought a teddy bear with us to leave with Tatiana in order to facilitate the connection between the two schools.

Tatiana blogged about our meeting on her blog Pre-Kinder Deer

During breakfast we made plans how we could accommodate our two schools’ different school year, since in Peru the school year ends in December and does not start back up until March. Only one hour of time difference would benefit and facilitate live video conferences between the two classes.

We thought of the following in order to connect the two classes together:

• Shared storytime.
  Let’s read English and Spanish books together. Our Spanish teacher will help in preparing our students for the Spanish book. Let’s think of a book that includes lots of interaction/verbal responses from the listeners
• Sing a song together- bilingual song, round, etc.
• Play a game- counting out rhyme- Arbolito de Peru. Cuantos anos tienes tu?
• Share a meal on both sides of the screen. Share tastes and smells? Fruits? Salchipapas?

As soon as I returned to my school this week, I asked if our Kindergarten teachers would be up for the challenge of connecting our little ones with the Peruvian class. As always, I could count on our Kindergarten team. So Jose and his twin “Jorge” will be in contact soon.

Latin America Trip Technology Reflection

I have been back for almost a week from our Costa Rica and Peru adventure which was part of my school’s Global Studies program. The trip fulfilled some of the Places in the World, I want to see…  The Latin American culture is very dear to my heart, due to my bonds to Argentina, as well as my undergrad studies of Latin American Literature and the following years of teaching Spanish.

In the next few weeks, I will add some personal reflections of the places we have visited on my travel blog. The places and people of Costa Rica and Peru are simply beautiful. It was a journey back in time and a privilege to be able to document it through technology.

This post though is the reflection of technology use during the trip and its impact back at school in Florida/USA. Here is a list of hardware and web based services that we used in order to bring the travel experience to our colleagues and students.

• I set off with a WordPress blog installed on our school’s website Each teacher received a login and password to be able to comment on any post. I encouraged them to, not only post questions in their comments, but contribute research and recounts of discussions and projects related to their Latin America studies that were taking place in the classroom or as homework assignments.
• A Flickr account was also in place from previous trips and continued to be an indispensable asset for integration of images AND video during the travels.
• Canon Rebel XT Digital Camera with two lenses
• Flip Camcorder (60 minutes Flip Ultra) in conjunction with Windows MovieMaker was the easiest and fastest way to edit and save movie clips to be uploaded to Flickr, which has a 90 seconds length limit for their videos.
• Dell Laptop with integrated webcam. For future travels I would recommend purchasing a Media Card reader to speed up the process of uploading the 500+ images daily.
• iRiver (MP3 recorder) for recording of audio only. We did not use this equipment at all on this trip. The easiness of the Flip camera made this one obsolete.
• A Thumb drive proved to be a great little addition, when the internet connection went out in our hotel room and we were allowed to use one of the  machines to upload to the blog and FLickr in the hotel’s business office. Since we could not hook our laptop up to their separate network. We wrote all the blog posts in Word, then saved them and the images to the thumb drive and uploaded from there.
• Skype made all the difference in the world in order to communicate with our own families as well as the school while we were on the road. I added U$10 to my account before I left and have plenty more than half of the money leftover after we have returned. That included free calls from computer to computer and daily calls to landlines and cell phone lines to organize and set up video conferences.

One day, while in the Urubamba Valley about 1 hour away from Cusco, we had a mandatory rest day, due to a strike. The streets were blocked with gigantic rocks as well as tree trunks. No car was able to get in or out for over 24 hours. We took the time to catch up on writing blog posts and have an open Skype connection during the entire school day. With only one hour of time difference between Peru and EST, it worked out nicely to have most grade levels cycle through the computer lab at school and have a few minutes to have a Question & Answer session as well as show them the view out of our window and the cabin we were staying in.

We had had another video conference while we were in Costa Rica. We knew what an impact we had when showing our students the view of the Arenal Volcano from our hotel room. It seemed to make a difference for our students to “feel” more part of our travels due to these video conferences. Upon our return, I heard many of them refer to the conferences: “Remember, when you were…”.

While we were planning our trip to Latin America, the storyline of “Indiana Jose and the Quest for the Crystal Skull” evolved. The story of Jose and the question “Who, Where and What is Pachamama?“became instrumental in getting the students from Pre-Kindergarten to 6th grade involved and eager to follow us on the blog.

Being able to follow the travelers daily on the blog as a class was instrumental for the students to feel part of the travel, research and outcome of our journey. Some teachers, back at school, told us that having a ceiling mounted projector in their classroom made all the difference for them to incorporate the blog and the excitement into their teaching and their daily routine compared to the teachers who had to sign up for time in the computer lab or colleague’s classroom to view the blog, videos or images via a projector. Having to sit 18-20 students around a small computer monitor did not have the same effect or desired involvement as the bigger projected screen achieved.

We also heard that the detailed images and the video clips were the highlights. A lesson to keep remembering that today’s students expect/demand more visual media in order to catch their attention.

In summary the following seemed to make a difference to involve students and teachers back at the school:

• Video Conferences with personal Q&A sessions and (if possible) relevant background view.
• Easy and readily accessibility to projector, screen and speakers viewable and audible by all students in the class.
• Compelling, age appropriate storyline to keep interest from day to day.
• Ask questions in our blog post, invite students to contribute or be part of the questions we are trying to answer.
• Inclusion of many relevant and interesting images that support the storyline and learning.
• Memorable/daring/unique/ video clips.

We shot over 2000 images and horus of video footage. This media is available through Flickr under the Creative Commons License for everybody to use. We are planning to use the images and videos at our school to allow students to create and support research, stories or other projects.