Howard Wolinsky, Skype’s USA blogger, contacted me a few days ago to ask if we could talk about the Around the World with 80 Schools project.
He recorded the skype conversation and wrote about it on School ‘langwitches’ teacher to reach out with Skype Video to 80 schools around the world.
I am hoping it will help spread the word of the project, especially to schools in Europe and Africa.
Contact
Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano for customized workshops, coaching and presentations.
Video Conference sessions available.
For a list of sample sessions visit Globally Connected Learning .
Tweet Andrea Hernandez, known as edtechworkshop in the blogger- and Twittersphere has written a thought provoking blogpost about Where’s The Authentic Audience? She takes a closer look at the buzz word circulating among blogging educators and classrooms and asks tough questions. What happens when there is no audience coming to …
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Tweet I invite few guest bloggers to share posts on Langwitches. This makes it especially rewarding to be able to present to my readers an incredible young lady. Zoe is growing by leaps and bounds as a blog writer and commenter. She is a fourth grader at the Martin J. …
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Tweet The following is a collaborative guest post by Michael Fisher and Jeanne Tribuzzi , of the Curriculum 21 Faculty. The companion LIVEBINDER OF INTERACTIVE TOOLS IS HERE. Expecting students to read deeply and draw meaningful conclusions is at the heart of the Common Core ELA standards. Students are asked …
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Tweet Our 4th and 5th grade students(9-10 year olds) have been working with Mike Fisher, co-author of Upgrading your Curriculum and author of children’s poems. The goal of their collaboration is to create an eBook of Mike’s poems with students’ illustrations. Once produced, students will work on marketing, advertising and …
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Tweet During last year’s edJEWcon conference (a Teaching & Learning Institute for Jewish Educators, which I help organize with Andrea Hernandez and Jon Mitzmacher), we invited our Middle School students to attend our keynote session with Heidi Hayes Jacobs. We all watched magic happen, when students (without being asked) created …
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Tweet You have all been there… Professional Development days at your school… Administration usually choose a topic, design the activities and/or bring in a speaker. Most likely, they will be slides with bullet points…listening…turn to your partners…learning about a new initiative your school will take part in…etc. As more and …
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Tweet In a unit on Transportation, our Kindergarteners read a large picture book “On the Move!” by Donna Latham Students got so interested into learning about different ways people around the globe got around. They were even ready to take a trip to Venice, Italy to ride in a Vaporetto. …
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Tweet Students need our guidance to use virtual platforms for ACADEMIC purposes. We can’t rely on their “so called” native status to know how and what to do. Just a few years ago, no one had heard of “backchanneling”, nowadays, it has become main stream (although most people might not …
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Tweet Our 4th and 5th grade students(9-10 year olds) have been working with Mike Fisher, co-author of Upgrading your Curriculum and author of children’s poems. The goal of their collaboration is to create an eBook of Mike’s poems with students’ illustrations. Once produced, students will work on marketing, advertising and …
(23 Comments)
Tweet Our 4th and 5th grade students(9-10 year olds) have been working with Mike Fisher, co-author of Upgrading your Curriculum and author of children’s poems. The goal of their collaboration is to create an eBook of Mike’s poems with students’ illustrations. Once produced, students will work on marketing, advertising and …
(23 Comments)
Tweet This is Part Two of Assessment in the Modern Classroom. Read Part One here. Assessing students’ writing, thinking level , understanding, learning connections via a Twitter stream, did not end the assessment upgrade for this particular learning opportunity. During the same Skype call, we paid special attention to how …
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Tweet I can die happy now I have seen learning in the 21st Century modern classroom! The learning just oozes through the cracks of the physical classroom walls. Learning is amplified by the amount of people who are collaborating, participating, communicating and creating. The learning is NOT about the technology …
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Tweet In a unit on Transportation, our Kindergarteners read a large picture book “On the Move!” by Donna Latham Students got so interested into learning about different ways people around the globe got around. They were even ready to take a trip to Venice, Italy to ride in a Vaporetto. …
(18 Comments)
Tweet During my visit this past January to the Graded School, in São Paulo, Brazil, I met Jamie Tuttle Middle School Guidance Counselor. He told me about an incident at their International School and the response as a community: We found our world map defaced with several derogatory and racist …
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Tweet I have been following the “Where the Hell is Matt” videos since 2006. I always thought the video is a great hook for students into geography. There are three versions available with a clear evolution of Matt growing as he travels around the world. From dancing in isolation in …
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Tweet There are many, many pockets of excellence in classroom/student blogging out there. These blogs are driven, coached and nurtured by educators who “get it”. They get how blogging makes a difference in student learning, supports 21st century modern learning skills and literacies and at the same time basic reading …
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Tweet Hyperlinks make the World Wide Web what it is. If links did not exist, EVERY web page would be a stand alone. Let’s take a close look at these “clickable thingies” I like the metaphor of thinking of hyperlinks as the “wormholes”, that transport us from one section of …
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Tweet I believe we are on our way of taking a modern classroom learning opportunity and upgrading assessment forms to match new skills and new literacies while not forgetting traditionally assessed ones. We took a classroom Twitter feed (Part One) , looked at the conversation skills students exhibited during the Skype …
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Tweet The picture above makes me smile… I see a group of Kindergarteners thinking, wondering, discussing, testing things out, collaborating, being proud of their independence as they are working with iPads. It was the first time, we “let go” with the iPads. Previously, we had iPad Centers, working with 3-4 …
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Tweet “Amplification” in education is a concept, I am deeply committed to. In a recent post, Upgrade & Amplification Exercise and Checklist, I try to break down the process of amplification and make it more transparent for educators. What I did not explicitly include was the component of another language …
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Tweet Recently, I tried to explain to a teacher from another school how we are trying to use iPads BEYOND apps. We have over 100 apps on our school iPads and introduce our students according to age level to a variety of them, but the focus of the use of …
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Tweet Matt Gomez shared a post today with a screenshot of his storytelling iPad app folder. I wanted to reciprocate and share mine. Storytelling I Folder StoryBuddy StoryBuilder StoryPagesHD Toontastic Tappy Memories StoryBoards Premium StoryMaker HD StoryPatch In a World … Drama Build a Story PhotoPuppets HD Epic Citadel Sock …
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Tweet I recently found a video of 1st graders using the iPad to visualize a poem that their teacher read to them. After students drew what they imagined, they got into pairs and explained their drawings to a partner. The teacher also circulated to listen and to ask deeper questions …
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Tweet Kindergarten time is storytelling time: Listening to stories, telling stories, acting stories out, learning how to read your own stories and creating your own stories! Learning about a holiday, like Thanksgiving in the USA, is the perfect time to cloak the historical origin into a fascinating story for five …
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This was a great presentation. It has motivated me to see more value in this project.
[...] this clip, Howard Wolinsky interviews Silvia Tolisano, technology integration facilitator at San José Episcopal Day School in Jacksonville FL about her [...]
[...] this clip, Howard Wolinsky interviews Silvia Tolisano, technology integration facilitator at San José Episcopal Day School in Jacksonville FL about her [...]
HI,
I work at a Dual Immersion school in the mountains of Colorado. We would love to connect via skype with your program.
Thanks,
Leslie Davison
Looking forward to connecting with you and your students too.
I am a library media specialist in Guilford, CT and would love to connect via skype to your program….
teresag70
[...] the World with 80 School Projects http://langwitches.org/blog/2009/01/10/skype-interview-around-the-world-with-80-schools-project/ (Sylvia Tolisano, Langwitches, 10 January 2009.) The author, a technology integration facilitator [...]
I have carried out an eTandem exchange via Skype with a Scottish high school and we had a lot of connectivity problems. Although we had a bandwidth of about 4Mbps, we didn’t manage to connect more than 8 learners simultaniously. Has anybody skyped in a classroom setting with a partner class?
Switzerland
@Ben
We have skyped with many different classrooms around the world, but at this point had only one connection open at the time. I would also be interested in hearing if anyone else had experience with having multiple skype connections open.
We use Skype on a regular basis with 16 students at a time, and it has worked fine. Skype clients will use extra bandwidth that is available to improve sound quality, so you first few connections may be using far more than are necessary. We use a packet shaper on campus and set all our Skype clients to connect on a specific port.
That being said, 4Mbps sounds like an awful lot. Was the other school on a similar connection. What else is the 4 Mbps supporting at the time on either side?
I would like to Skype, during school hours (8 am through 2 pm PST)with other middle schools across the country. I teach 6th, 7th, and 8th grades at Child’s Way Charter School, in Culp Creek, Oregon (Near Eugene). Any Subject and have a Knowledge Bowl. You may contact my school at 541-946-1045 or contact me via email at alberto.martinez@cwcs0809.com
Alberto Martinez,
Middle School Teacher
I too would like to Skype during school hours (CST or GMT-6) with other classrooms around the globe. I teach 7th grade social studies in rural Illinois. jhitchcock@mail.coalcity.k12.il.us
@Jim,
The best place to get started is to join the Around the World with 80 Schools. That will put you in contact with 350+ educators from around the world.
[...] for Education Classrooms participating in programs like Around the World in 80 Schools, could benefit from five way calling in Skype. Now more classrooms can connect in less time. [...]
[...] erzählt und danach haben wir an einem Projket mit ihrer Schule in USA gearbeitet. Durch Silvia´s “Around the world with 80 Schools” haben wir viele Kinder  in USA und Spanien kennengelernt, wir waren mit SKype – [...]
This is what technology is all about.
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