Interactive Videoconferencing @ University School

Ash Spill IVC Collaboration with Community Members in East Tennessee

2010-02-09T12:22:00.000-08:00

Freya Sachs' high school Environmental Perspectives class joined other classrooms around the country on January 28 for a presentation with Roan County High School students and community members who were affected by the now-infamous Emory River ash spill. The spill, occurring in December 2008, is described along with some of its thorny issues in this quote from knoxvillebiz.com:

An estimated 1.1 billion gallons of water and ash burst from a failed retention pond for the TVA Kingston fossil plant near Harriman in the early morning of Dec. 22, 2008. Following the spill, TVA President and CEO Tom Kilgore said TVA was throwing all available resources at the problem and was in the process of beginning the reclamation phase of the cleanup operation. Meanwhile, nearby residents were left homeless and others fretted about the possible effects on their health. On July 28, 2009, the TVA inspector general wrote in a damning report that found TVA could have prevented the spill and limited the probe of its cause.

Members of the community were there, a representative from TVA gave a talk describing his organization's policy and responses, and the mayor made a little speech, then students from all participating sites were allowed to submit two questions apiece to any of the presenters. It was quite an interesting hour.

I invite students to comment here.

Vanderbilt Virtual School Black History Month at USN

2010-02-04T13:37:00.000-08:00

Our 5th grade students are participating along with several other schools across the country in an Interactive Videoconferencing series offered by Vanderbilt Virtual School and focused on Black History. The series, as outlined by the VVS website, consists of five program presentations with opportunities to ask questions of the presenters. The classes will participate in the first four, but they'll have to miss the last opportunity due to scheduling complications.

This a wonderful series and we thank VVS Director Patsy Partin for putting it together and making it available. Thanks also to Tandberg Corporation for their loan of the fabulous Edge95 codec that makes our crystal clear connections possible!

From the VVS website:

"BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2010 "
For students in grades 5 -12
SPRING CATALOG 2010

Tuesday, February 2
Dr. Frank Dobson
“From Slavery To Freedom: Stories of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Harriet Tubman”

Tuesday, February 9
Howard Gentry
“Breaking the Color Barrier”

Tuesday, February 16
Dr. Frank Dobson
"Life and Legacy of Paul Laurence Dunbar"

Tuesday, February 23
James Nixon
"Black History of the Blues"

Thursday, February 25
David Mills
Unholy: The Slaves Bible

USN to Join Forces with Tandberg in Promising Loaner Program

2009-04-07T03:45:00.000-07:00

We are lucky to know Jan Zanetis, Education Marketing Manager for the Tandberg Corporation, with whom we sealed a deal this week to place a $14,000 Tandberg codec in our school for a run at Virtual Field Trips from IVC content providers the last two months of this school year. Next year, we hope to get the unit back in exchange for five online content offerings from our school to the world. More on that later, and keep an eye out here for ongoing documentation as we take advantage of this wonderful opportunity!

Thanks, Jan!

Steve Hargadon Talks with Teachers about Web2.0

2008-09-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

Hi, ya'll,

This site hasn't seen a post for a while, and it's largely because I'm not pushing IVC at the school as much as I have in past years. Partly that's because of my intense revamping of curriculum in my own classroom, and it also has to do with focus on other areas of technology. I remain convinced that IVC (using dedicated codecs for the task) is an important tool, but I also see that using desktop applications is an important innovation. To my mind the diversification of Tandberg and Polycom into more and more desktop applications proves that point.

Meanwhile, I want to share a rough video recording I made this past summer as my USN Web20forUs! teacher workshop, four days of exploration into the tools, made use of Skype to bring in a leader in the field of Web 2.0, Classroom20.com founder Steve Hargadon. Steve runs this professional learning community of over 10,000 members, and the fact that he would take time to drop in over Skype and engage in discussion with our little band of 10 teachers is testament to the power of online collaboration and to the sharing that goes on every day between teachers who are using Web 2.0 tools. Enjoy:

Find more videos like this on Classroom 2.0

"Out of These Doors" 7th Graders Visit Cleveland...in Their Classroom!

2008-04-17T11:20:00.001-07:00

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!

TheatreLink 2008!

2008-02-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

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!:

Classical Music at Vanderbilt Virtual School!

2007-12-15T05:50:00.000-08:00

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!

TheatreLink Kicks off for 2007!

2007-01-24T13:24:00.000-08:00

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!):

4th Graders Chat with NASA--"Our Solar System"

2007-01-05T09:50:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-07T08:34:00.000-08:00

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 BubbleShare.com Here's a picture player:

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Chat with 4th Grader Kiana in Holland

2006-10-11T19:06:00.000-07:00

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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GarageBand3 for Podcasting Class!

2006-10-05T12:29:00.000-07:00

I was able to convince friend and colleague Julene Reed--Director of Academic Technology at St. George's Independent Schools in Collierville, Tennessee, Apple Distinguished Educator, and Apple Podcasting teacher for educators worldwide--to come into our Tibbott Center Apple Lab for a class to introduce Matt Haber's Radio and Podcasting class to the wonders of GarageBand3, the newest version of Apple's marvelous multimedia platform that actually has a tab on its welcome screen that says "New Podcast!"

For those of you who might not know what a podcast is, feel free to check out my own version of the story at my Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach podcasting page.

I put together a brief series of movie clips to celebrate and archive the experience. I want to thank Julene for this completely donated tutorial. She's taking off for a conference in London tomorrow and I hope she gets a peek at my little film (created with still-photo Canon camera in video mode and patched together with Windows Movie Maker. The next time I do one of these it might just be with iLife/GarageBand3!

Here's the "movie":

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A Brief Movie Clip from the Banned Books Virtual Panel Discussion

2006-09-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Brian Smokler at Peabody at Vanderbilt for hosting our Internet2 experience with the Banned Books Virtual Panel Discussion. I took a brief video that will give you a bit of an idea of how the discussion started off:

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Banned Books! Internet2 Interaction

2006-09-25T15:56:00.000-07:00

Woooooow. This was fabulous, ya'll. We were lucky enough to be among the 15 registrants to be chosen to participate interactively and then lucky enough to be hosted by the fantastic Brian Smokler, Vanderbilt University, Manager Instructional Systems, Peabody College; Video Technical Mgr, Public Affairs News Office (had to cut and paste that one!) at the Wyatt Center's IVC room across the street. I'm pasting in a slideshow, then check below for pertinent links. REALLY take the hour and 40 minutes or so to watch this one via the archive link below (caution: this is PG13 material, and some might suggest an R rating, very appropriate to the topic of the session). I don't think I've ever seen an IVC with a presenter so impassioned about his topic he nearly wept. Great questions at the end! If you click on the slideshow you'll be taken to a page where you can view it larger, via a nice new service called "BubbleShare."

Cheers,
Scott

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Links:

"Banned Books" program website

Archive Page (scroll to the bottom then select the Quicktime option (make sure your Quicktime is updated to the latest version!)

Last Day of School IVC with Boowa!

2006-05-30T06:31:00.000-07:00

Hey, ya'll,

I won't re-post it, but I will encourage you to check out my Lower School teacher page for a detailed description of what is becoming a tradition--a live sing-along with the big blue dog Boowa at Boowa and Kwala's uptoten.com website. The amazing thing is that the creator and voice talent behind Boowa actually lives on Mauritius, a tropical island off the east coast of Madagascar. There's a li'l movie there, too!

Cheers,
Scott

TheatreLink 2005-6 Concludes!

2006-05-19T06:39:00.000-07:00

As my first entry here, I want to celebrate another fantabulous year's work by USN High School students with the Manhattan Theatre Club's extraordinary international project, TheatreLink. Wow. This project has legs, ya'll; by which I mean that it has all the earmarks of a program destined to function as a model for all sorts of other ones in all sorts of other areas.

Last year, I won a prize (3rd) in Polycom's Keystone Conference (Indianapolis) challenge to celebrate valuable projects with others by writing a 500 word or less description of such a project. I chose this one: I wish I'd waited until this year because I'd be a shoo-in for 1st prize with the deeper understanding facilitating the work leant me this year.

Over the next week I hope to edit and add some video from our students' work and ongoing TheatreLink collaborative videoconferences throughout the year. Meanwhile, here's the collective evaluation (for the HS mixed-grade level "Online Playwriting" class, taught by Gus Gillette) from three of the USN students who participated this year:

We have learned about the process of playwriting; making characters real, turning emotions into actions, designing simple sets, among other things. When we wrote our first draft we put the entire plot into the dialogue, but then we realized that real people are complex and don’t always express themselves words, but with body language, tone of voice, and action. So by the final draft we had a play that, even though it had less dialogue, had it had a lot of character driven action for the actors to express.
Another really cool thing about this class was the fact that we could do the whole video conference thing. We also thought that being able to talk to and interact with people across the country, or even across the world, like they are sitting in front of you was really neat. We especially liked at the very beginning when we even did some improvisation together, it was hard to believe that they were all the way in New York! This was also fun because we got to meet some new and interesting people from around the world.
This whole process was a fun and very interesting class, it was so well put together and planned out that everything seemed to work perfectly. We are all so glad that we decided to take this class, it has really taught us a lot about theater, acting, and playwriting, as well as introducing us to people from here and in other countries. We would all definitely take this class again.

Sincerely,
H Period
Katy
Deirdre
Meghan

And here's another:

To start off, we would like to thank you for all of your help in the technical and organizational aspects of this project. If it had been necessary for us to do the technical and theatrical parts of the project, someone may have lost his or her mind (aka Kerchie). There are some things that really left a lasting impression. It was so interesting to work with our mentor that was in New York, becaue it seemed as if he was right next to us. He could watch our performances and offer us helpful advice. It was also really awesome to watch our play performed in Anatolia live, and talk about it with the actors. It really gave us good practice for acting in front of a camera. While we did have an audience, it was like a rehearsal because there weren’t actually people in the room. So, in a sense, there was a lot less pressure than regular stage acting. We had a lot of time time constraints, but in the end they were a good learning experience that improved both the writing and performance aspects of the project as a whole. And finally, it was pretty ridiculous to meet all those people from Greece and Oregon, and to be able to communicate with them on a personal level. This is a well organized and thought out project that is wonderfully informative and educational for young and aspiring actors, directors, and writers. Definitely a repeater! Again, thank you for all your help…

Sincerely, E-period
Kerchanin
Jackson
Tyler

Interactive Videoconferencing at University School of Nashville

2006-05-19T06:05:00.000-07:00

Hi, ya'll,

If you've made it to this page you probably already know what it's about. If you don't, in a nutshell, it's about everything we do at University School of Nashville, a thriving independent K12 school on the edge of urban Nashville, Tennessee--everything, that is, having to do with interactive videoconferencing.

Here I'll attempt to celebrate our efforts, chronicle our travails, and link to resources about IVC. I'll also provide links to my other efforts to promote IVC as a tool to disappear the walls that keep learning from achieving the global proportions it needs to achieve if there's to be any real hope for our collective future.

Joan, if you're reading this, I'm sorry. I know one more online resource from me is gonna make you mad. I just can't help myself. I gotta share.