"Out of These Doors" 7th Graders Visit Cleveland...in Their Classroom!
The
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's IVC outreach program goes out to a broad audience every year. Their 2006 Annual fiscal report claims that their educational programs, both in house and over distance, reach over 50,000 students a year. It's not hard to see why, after facilitating University School of Nashville's experience with their "On the Road" series program, "Rock and Roll through the Ages" videoconference. Here's a slideshow of pics:
and here's a very brief video from the interaction, in which R&R Educational Coordinator John Goehrke welcomes our students as the R&R Hall of Fame's very first IVC in the state of Tennessee!
Labels: IVC, learning, Merrick, teaching, USN, videoconference, videoconferencing
TheatreLink 2008!
Gus Gillette's Online Playwriting Class got underway on January 31 with an IVC (facilitated, due to connection problems, with audio from a cell phone connection!) between his students here at University School of Nashville and Joe White, Teacher Artist at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. This was an informal conversation during which Mr. White led students through the feelings and character motivations of the play being studied,
Here's
a video from part of that interaction.
And here's the video, embedded right here!:
Labels: Gillette, TheatreLink, USN
Classical Music at Vanderbilt Virtual School!
On December 10, 2007, students in Judy Yeaworth's high school Music Theory class were treated to a wonderful hour of classical music by a professional chamber orchestra called
Alias. The activity was
offered by the
Vanderbilt Virtual School, and was nothing short of marvelous.
I have a good deal of audio and video from that interaction and as soon as I can make sense of any of it I will be posting more here!
Labels: classical music, IVC, Merrick, USN, Vanderbilt Virtual School, videoconference, videoconferencing
TheatreLink Kicks off for 2007!
USN's participation in the Manhattan Theatre Club's "TheatreLink" program has begun, this year with a wonderful hour of chat with MTC's Chris Ceraso--actor, writer, teacher and mentor. There will be comments here soon that will more fully describe the event, but I want to go ahead and post the video for the sake of celebrating it. The video is only one small portion of the conversation that ensued. You'll have to imagine the rest!
See more about TheatreLink at their website!
Here's
a direct link to the .wmv movie file (large file, open with Internet Explorer!):
Labels: Gillette, IVC, Merrick, theater, theatre, TheatreLink, USN, videoconference, videoconferencing
4th Graders Chat with NASA--"Our Solar System"
On January 4, just the second day back from Winter Holidays, all USN 4th graders gathered in the Hassenfeld Library classroom to participate in an "Our Solar System" interactive videoconference with an expert at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. This Center produces a robust series of offerings via IVC every year, and their offerings are completely free of fees. We reserved our spot in this interaction 'way back in October.
4th grade Teacher
Lynn Noel and I connected with NASA's David Massa well before the scheduled interaction to make sure the technical requirements were met, and we left the unit on to maintain the connection. When the fourth graders arrived, the connection had been dropped and there ensued a flurry of redialing, rebooting, and re-emailing before the connection was re-established.
NASA's Roger Storm proceeded to chat about the relative distances of the planets from the sun, using a great metaphor of "blocks away from school." In this analogy, the earth is 1 block from school, with the other two "Inner Planets" in between. Pluto resides 40 blocks away!
Questions and answers were wonderful, and girls and boys alike asked questions which were carefully and cleverly answered.
View a 9 minute .wmv video to get a real sense of how the interaction went!
Crisis in the Sudan Series with Global Nomads
Mackey Luffman's high school World Civilizations class is knee-deep into a study of genocide and its implications to our own society and to its foreign policy. In pursuit of that learning, we signed up for
Global Nomads Group's "
Considering Genocide in Sudan" IVC series.
Participating in the first of that series was enlightening for Mr. Luffman's class. He told me that he felt our students were well prepared, perhaps better so than others; but that even so they enjoyed the discussion with students in schools in Canada, Texas, and Indiana, led by GNG founder
David Macquart.
The second event, held at noon our time on Thursday the 7th of December, had more schools participating and a very interesting presentation and interactive discussion with activist Erin Mazursky, a Georgetown University student who is founder of the organization
STAND: A Student-led Anti-Genocide Coalition.
Mr. Luffman is inviting his students to comment here as a follow-up, be sure to check the "Comments" here, and feel free to comment as well (comments are moderated).
Pictures I snapped during the events are posted at
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Chat with 4th Grader Kiana in Holland
On Wednesday, October 11, 2006, we met via Skype with a 4th grader who's been in Holland with her parents since the start of the school year. She'll not be returning to the States until January, after our Winter Holidays, so we thought it might be a good idea to get together before that. Our first meeting was eventful and lasted nearly an hour, with very little audio drop out and a very good video connection.
I had Skype running on my laptop and the laptop connected to a projector and we ran audio through my Polycom Communicator. There was some skippiness in the audio but generally we heard everything Kiana said from her apartment in Holland and she heard everything we said in our computer lab in Nashville, Tennessee. This is certainly one of the good ways the earth is "flattening."
Click below to launch a brief video in Windows Media Player:
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