HSD Videoconferencing

Three high school foreign language teachers, Mrs. Sherri Seachrist, Mr. Ryan Stralo, and Mr. Xiaodong Fan celebrated NEA’s Read Across America by collaborating with other classrooms “around the planet”. Mrs. Seachrist and Mr. Stralo’s classes both connected with students from Monmouth County Vocational School District in Neptune, NJ and Mr. Fan’s class connected with students from Los Angeles Unified School District in Los Angeles, CA. Read Across America is sponsored by Twice and Polycom, in cooperation with NEA. Twice provided the matching service for point-to-point videconferences betwee schools. Using this video conference technology, the classrooms were able to present flashcards, skits, songs, questions and more to each other. It was a new and powerful experience for many of the students!

During block 3 and 4 on Thursday, February 19th, the Distance Lab was open and available for teachers and students to view the annual “Megaconference Jr. 2009″. The exciting opportunity sponsored by MAGPI is in its sixth year. The project is designed to give students in elementary and secondary schools around the world the opportunity to interact and communicate with each other. It is a 12 hour event which makes it possible to include schools from all time zones. Schools from Australia, Canada, Portugal, Croatia, Great Britain, Spain, US and more were included in the event. Mrs. Buckwalter’s Family and Consumer Science students attended a portion of block 4 where they had an opportunity to see a presentation from Millgrove Early Years School in Alberta, Canada titled “Camping Around Alberta”. It gave the students an exciting look into the world of videoconferencing! Mrs. Buckwalter hopes to bring her students again to the lab in the spring.

Two HHS PES classes attended a virtual town hall meeting sponsored by Springfield High School as part of the Megaconference Jr. videoconferencing event yesterday. Students discussed bipartisan Washington, the closing of Guantanamo Bay and the stimulus bill. The most lively discussion focused on education funding in the stimulus bill. The students used a blog to post comments during the videoconference which may be used to continue the topics discussed during the event. We are looking forward to continuing to examine current events issues and interact via videoconferencing with Springfield High School. Look for further postings about this continuing project!!

Two classes of HHS PES students will be participating in a presentation on Megaconference Jr. with Springfield High School. They will be one of four classes participating in a virtual town hall discussion of President Obama’s first 100 days, his policies and decisions. The students will be posting comments and questions to a blog prior to the videoconference and then discussing their postings during the videoconference. We are looking forward to a lively discussion!!

We have added a new page to our blog to use to post flyers about upcoming videoconferencing opportunities. If you are interested in videoconferencing in your classroom we suggest subscribing to RSS feed on the blog to stay informed!