6 Schools- 6 Countries-1 Hour

Six schools in six countries in one hour? Is it possible?

Over 100 participants in 23 countries have shown desire to connect with other schools and left their contact information.

Time zones issues seem to be the biggest hurdle in connecting our students with schools from the Eastern Hemisphere during school hours.

I invited the students in my TechClub to come and join me on a Sunday evening, the night before a school holiday on Monday, in order to skype with schools in Asia and Australia. Luckily that school holiday was a country specific one (Presidents Day) that the  other schools did not observe.

My own daughters and a family friend joined us to create a group of students from grade levels ranging from 4th-11th grade.

As you can see from screenshots of Google Earth above, taken on Sunday February at 8 pm (EST), it was already dark for us on the East Coast of Florida while the schools in Asia and Australia were already in school on Monday morning.

We met about 30 minutes before I had scheduled the first skype call with Thailand for 8 pm (our time). I showed everyone the google map with yellow placemarks indicating the schools that we would be talking to that evening. We made a visual connection to the time zone issue by looking at the geographic location of these schools on the map.

Each student received six index cards that they labeled with the country. I then asked for volunteers to

1. Introduce our school
2. Share something about our school or location
3. Ask a question

I also asked them to help me take notes of what each school would be sharing or asking us.

While we were in the middle of preparing our index cards, we received the first Skype chat notification from Ann Mirtschin (Australia) that they were ready for the call. Oops, even with using GMT and a converter online, I still must have mixed up the timezones and was off by one hour. (Maybe Daylight Savings time issue?)

So we needed to be flexible and improvised and jump in!

Open YOUR windows to the world!

image by ozekki

You could literally hear the hinges of the window screech as they opened up and we connected with:

1. Anne Mirtschin from Hawkesdale P12 College,  in Hawkesdale, Australia
2. Chrissy Hellyer from International School of Bangkok, Thailand
3. Jason Crewe from Busan Foreign School Elementary School in Busan, South Korea
4. Wendy Liao from United World College of South East Asia East Campus in Singapore
5. Heather Davis from Yew Chung International School of Beijing, China
6. Amanda Marrinan from St John Vianney’s School in Brisbane, Australia

In one hour students were exposed to:

• Connections to people and  cultures from
  • Australia
  • Singapore
  • China
  • South Korea
  • Thailand
• Measurements and Conversions
  • Temperature- Celsius- Fahrenheit
  • Distance- Kilometers-Miles
• Geographic Literacies
  • Language, Accents s & Dialects
  • Time Zones
  • Hemispheres
  • Seasons
  • Continents
  • Oceans
  • Location
• Technology
  • SmartBoard
  • Webcam
  • Skype
  • Chat,
  • GoogleMaps
  • Spreadsheet

Questions students asked the most

• Subjects taught in School
• Sports
• After School Activities
• How many languages do you speak?
• How many different nationalities are in your class

Students took notes on what they heard during our connections

Australia- Hawkesdale

• 11th & 12 th Graders
• It is summer there right now
• Boomerang is used for hunting, killing animals
• Lots of Koalas and Kangaroos
• Waltzing Matilda is an Australian folk song
• Red White and Blue flag

Thailand- Bangkok

• 5th Graders
• 81 year old king
• 15106.82 km away from Jacksonville ~9320.56 miles
• About 53 different nationalities
• International School
• 1870 students at the school
• They are in the rainy season- hot and humid
• They have many After School Activities
• Soccer is a very popular sport

Singapore

• Kindergarten
• other side of the world
• Audio was not working well

South Korea- Busan

• 4th Graders
• One student used to live in Jacksonville
• best food in cafeteria is Pizza
• Many of the students have been to the USA
• Popular sport: soccer
• Really hot in the summer

China- Beijing

• 4thGraders
• Wear red shirts as part of their uniform
• School is on East side of Beijing
• They like to play football, soccer, rollerskating, ping pong, basketball, badminton, Monopoly
• Their teacher, Mrs. Davis is from Canada
• Each student is from a different country, no Chinese students are at the school
• They all speak English and Chinese and the language of their home country.
• They travel a lot during their vacation
• Just celebrated the Chinese New Year (Year of the Ox)
• Currently -2 C
• About 850 students at school from 41 countries
• They like to eat ice cream
• They just learned about Alaska
• Ni Hao (Hello)
• Xie Xie (Thank you)

Australia- Brisbane

• 2nd Graders
• Net Ball- Like Basketball, but you don’t dribble, you have to throw it into a goal
• Sunny and hot
• They play soccer, cricket, football and netball (for girls), swimming, tennis
• They live close to the Pacific Ocean
• They live close to a bay.  “MoretonBay”
• One family of their class lives on a boat
• 28 C- 82 F
• 26 kids in class- 16 are boys
• compared activities in school
• wear uniforms

Things to consider for the future:

• Students tend to be quiet and shy the first time. As will anything else, give them time to practice and they will come out of their shells
• Let students be more involved with setting up the skype call. Let them manage the chat, dial in and video and audio settings
• Let students guide the conversation more
• Practice through role play ahead of time a CONVERSATION.
• Teach them to continue a question with follow up. How about you? My name is….what is yours?, etc.
• Improvisation and flexibility. How much do you want to script and prepare the conversation? How does that affect English Language Learners?

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Young Learners and PowerPoint

Many times there is pressure to teach the “traditional” Office programs (word processing/spreadsheet/presenting software) in school. Parents and administrators have something tangible to see/say that their child/student is learning/getting computer skills. It is harder to recognize/put your fingers on skills like communication, collaboration and connections.

So far, we had started first graders out on using PP to create a presentation about an insect project. They were given a template with a predetermined number of slides and learned how to:

• edit title of slide
• enter bullets and text
• add/change background color
• insert transitions
• insert clipart or images
• save and retrieve their file

I attended a presentation Kinder can do PowerPoints too at TCEA this month, that got me excited about the possibilities of combining some 21st century skills and the introduction to a program like PowerPoint for our younger students.

The concept and design can of course be adapted to older students as well and is not limited to PowerPoint, but will work beautifully with the SmartBoard Notebook Software.

The idea is to not just give students a template that they learn how to edit by adding content, but to allow them to manipulate a file created by their teacher that shows their comprehension of a lesson.

They do not just sit through and watch a presentation file, but are in the driver seat to manipulate the PP file in the edit mode.

Steps for creating  your own unit/lesson activity for your students to manipulate:

1. Decide what skills you want your students to learn or reinforce.
   1. Choose a book, lesson unit, or holiday
2. Find or create media that contain the information you want your students to gather, process, or use in the activities.
   1. Use Discovery Education video segments (directly embed into PP) or download and convert (Zamzar) video files from YouTube before embedding.
   2. Look for Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr.
3. Creating your  slides
   1. Title Slide with Student Name
   2. Slide with media for students to explore: text,  images, audio or video or combination
   3. Activity Slide 1
   4. Activity Slide 2
   5. Activity Slide 3 (number of activities depend on age of students)
4. Record audio instructions for your students to follow on each slide. Reinforces written instructions.

Skills addressed:

1. Reading
2. Following directions
3. Learning to listen to, read and watch in order to extract information and comprehension.
4. Move from one slide to another
5. Drag and drop
6. Highlighting
7. Deleting & entering text
8. Extracting information in different media (audio/video/images)
9. Printing (Handout view of their manipulated slide)

Comprehension activity types:

• Drag and Drop
• Sorting
• Sequencing
• Multiple Choice
• True/False
• Pointing to

How to Create a Great PowerPoint by Alvin Trusty

I watched this recording from one of Alvin Trusty‘s presentations and thought it was well worth sharing.

He gives great ideas and logistical how-to in order to create better PowerPoints. Here are some techniques and points I will want to experiment and consider further:

• motion path
• animation grow/shrink
• graying out items on list
• “fade smoothly” transition
• cropping images within PowerPoint
• contrast/repetition/alignment/proximity

At the same time his presentation is about Copyright. I can’t decide which part is the better? They are very cleverly interwoven.
Here are the books that Alvin recommends:

How to Create a Great PowerPoint – Take 2.0 from Alvin Trusty on Vimeo.