Maternity Leave, New Website and MAGPI Fall Programs

I know it's been quite a while since I've posted, but I am happy to announce that on June 28, 2009, my husband and I welcomed our first child, Lila Grace, into the world. Therefore, I've been on maternity leave since then and will continue to be through mid-September.

But things are still very busy with MAGPI! We've launched a brand new website (www.magpi.net) and will be launching a brand-new registration system soon. Our fall program descriptions are posted and you can download the fall program listing by clicking on "Program and Events" on the home page and then clicking on "Download Program Catalog" (it's a PDF). Registration will open later this summer. You can read the full program descriptions and see resources for each event on the website by clicking on "programs" under your community; however, dates and times are not posted on the website yet because they are directly linked to the new registration system and that is still under development. Dates and times are published in the PDF version of the program catalog.

We've also selected and announced our 2009 Fellows! The Fellows will be gathering in August for their Summer Institute and I look forward to working with all of them during the coming year. For more information about our Fellowship program, please see: http://www.magpi.net/Community/Programs/MAGPI-Fellows-Program.

I'll be posting periodically throughout the summer - - but look for more regular posts this fall!

World Ocean's Day Webcast

On June 8, IGLO, in collaboration with the World Ocean Network (WON), will be celebrating World Oceans Day (WOD) with a live webcast featuring NOAA's Dr. Chris Sabine speaking on Ocean Acidification.

Every year, World Ocean Day brings together more than 250 organizations spanning five continents and reaching more than 150 million visitors in museums and science centers, aquariums, educational charities, institutions and NGOs. Designated by the United Nations and supported by the World Ocean Network and The Ocean Project, World Oceans Day is a celebration designed to raise awareness about the importance of the ocean and the impact of our daily actions on the marine environment. This year's theme is "One Ocean, One Climate, One Future."

Dr. Sabine's presentation on ocean acidification will address one of the most crucial issues linking oceans and climate. View his presentation live at 2:30 p.m. EDT! For more information, visit: www.astc.org/iglo.

The webstream will be live at 2:15 p.m. EDT on Monday, June 8^th. To access the webstream, go to http://codian.oar.net. Put 5147 into the conference ID field, choose your preferred stream rate and click ‘stream this conference.’ That will launch the streaming browser. A chat box will appear as well, which will allow individuals at your institution to ask questions of the speaker.

MAGPI is happy to be partnering with ASTC, NOAA and the Internet2 Commons to bring you this program!

Students, Authors and Videoconferencing: Descriptive Writing with Mary Quattlebaum

This week, MAGPI has been wrapping up several projects and programs for the 2008-2009 academic year. Several of these programs revolved around students interacting with authors, so I thought I'd reflect on the different models. (I'm also starting to put together our programs and projects for next year - - so catharsis is always good!). Today, I'm looking at the descriptive writing videoconference with author Mary Quattlebaum.

Children's book author Mary Quattlebaum has been working with MAGPI for three years now, and is truly a pleasure to work with! Over the past three years, we've co-developed two program platforms (one based on haiku poetry that we do in the fall and one based on her book Jackson Jones and the Puddle of Thorns) and offered them twice a year. She graciously donates her time and her publishing companies are always kind enough to donate one copy of her book to each participating class.

Yesterday, we held the Jackson Jones and the Puddle of Thorns videoconference program with five 3rd through 5th classes in Pennsylvania. Students read the short chapter book ahead of time and responded to a prompt (written by Mary) that asked them to write a descriptive paragraph:

In "Jackson Jones and the Puddle of Thorns" (pages 106-107), Jackson describes the garden using many of his senses. How does he seem to feel about it?

In preparation for this videoconference event, students should use their senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch (at least 3 of 5) to write a description of a place special to them. How does being in that place make them feel? Descriptions should be relatively short (about 1 to 3 paragraphs long).

Each school selected one student's work to submit and we posted them on the project website. We then assigned a school to read and reflect on another school's work. The student descriptive pieces are great - - I encourage you to visit the site and take a look! I'm still chuckling about Evan's description of Mickey D's ... and how a bad day at McDonald's is when you get a "prosthetic thumb in your iced coffee." (Bethel Elementary's submission).

During the videoconference, Mary gave a brief presentation on the book making process and then asked each school to read their submission aloud. After skillfully providing thoughtful feedback to the student author (i.e. "I really liked how you used language that...") and asking a few questions of the author about his or her writing process, she invited the school that read the students' piece ahead of time to reflect for the rest of the group. Although students were certainly well prepared, Mary's modeling of the feedback went a tremendous way toward helping students formulate thoughtful critiques and extend their feedback beyond simple statements such as "I really liked your paragraph." Also, Mary's careful attention to detail and kind words provided validation for the student authors -- who bravely read their work in a videoconference environment and answered questions on the spot from a "published author!"

This videoconference event wrapped up with Mary sharing a quick garden craft and answering questions from students at each of the sites. For more about Mary (and for instructions on the sweet potato garden craft she demonstrated), visit her website.

Granted, we've done this program multiple times; however, I really felt like it flowed effortlessly yesterday. Mary was quite the pro 'on-screen' and facilitated interaction between the multiple sites effortlessly. Although any time students get to interact with authors is exciting, I felt this program went particularly well because Mary quickly adapted to the students' needs and continually involved them throughout the 75 minute exchange (a long time to engage elementary school students).

A few notes:

• Agenda setting was key in making this program work! As students became more aware of the process for sharing and responding to one another's work, they became more at ease with one another, the technology and Mary herself.
• Planning time was time well spent. These types of author exchanges take more time to set-up: more of my time in terms of coordinating information between the schools; the author's time in terms of reading student work ahead of time and working with me to formulate a more interactive agenda; and the teacher's time in terms of integrating the descriptive writing activity into their classroom and creating time for students to read/respond to another student's work. I would argue, however, that this particular videoconference was more meaningful to students (and me, the author and the teachers!) because of the time invested up front.
• Time keeping is critical. In a 75 minute videoconference, mixing up instructional strategies is key to keeping students engaged. Equally important is watching the clock -- we ran out of time at the end yesterday and the MCU kicked all of the participants off!
• Working with individuals who are truly interested and invested in the educational process is WONDERFUL! Mary is such a pro! I can't thank her enough for all of the time she invested into making sure this was a wonderful experience that nurtured burgeoning student writers! While some authors may have perceived this as merely a marketing tool (which, if we're honest, it certainly is), Mary spent time encouraging every student who participated in yesterday's program by providing thoughtful and constructive feedback. This wasn't something that could be done 'on the fly' and required thoughtful preparation.

Although we did get disconnected at the end of the event, Mary was kind enough to write an email to all of the participating teachers that I thought I'd share with you:

Hello Everyone,

I so enjoyed yesterday's video conference. All your students were so well prepared and had much to offer. It was a pleasure to hear and see them on the screen. And many thanks to Heather, who always does a wonderful job of coordinating the series.

I'm sorry, too, that we ran out of time and wanted to make sure I got back to Dunmore with the answer to the final question, which I think was something like this: Did any animals or pets inspire your books?

Answer: Yes! Animals seem to inspire many writers. Do you like to write about your pets? Let's see, for me there's a performing hamster in "Jazz, Pizzazz, and the Silver Threads" inspired by my first childhood hamster, Ginger. "The Magic Squad and the Dog of Great Potential" has a big, goofy dog, Train, based on a childhood dog, Muttsy. I think I mentioned a picture book I'm working on, in which there's a guinea pig, like ours, named Smoochie. And our old dog, Charlie, just inspired an early reader. I also like to write articles and poems about the animals and birds in the natural world. (Which is like Samantha, who shared her writing about her cabin during the
videoconference.)

Please do feel free to get in touch with me through my website http://www.maryquattlebaum.com/, if you and your students have other questions. And if you try the sweet-potato craft in your classroom, do let me know if it grows. Sometimes it sprouts leaves and roots, sometimes, alas, it doesn't.

Wishing you a good end to the school year,
Mary

Many thanks to Mary and all of the teachers and students who made this program a success!

100th Day of School Project - Revisited

In March, MAGPI, UNC-Asheville, and Peachtree Publishing sponsored the 100th Day of School Videoconference Celebration with author Dr. Lester Laminack. 12 schools (Grades K-2) from across the MAGPI region read Dr. Laminack's book, Jake's 100th Day of School and created class collections of 100 objects. The projects were incredible. Here are some of my favorites:

• 100 images of their school mascot
• 100 images of their community
• 100 pieces of candy
• 100 snack ingredients
• 100 "words we know"
• 100 kind deeds (or random acts of kindness)
  

During the videoconference, students listened to Dr. Laminack, presented their collections/projects to one another and asked Dr. Laminack questions. Cathie Cooper from Garnet Valley School District was kind enough to share this video of her students presenting their project. A fabulous example! Thanks to Cathie for sharing (and thanks to the students in the video, and the students' parents for allowing us to post)!




And check out the project students at Hempfield School District did (posted on their blog!)

Supporting Videoconference-Based Learning Events with Virtual Reality

On April 2nd, MAGPI tried our first simultaneous multisite videoconference and virtual reality program. Students at seven schools participated in “Fleshing the Bones: The Art and Science of Drawing Dinosaurs” videoconference with The Academy of Natural Sciences. While students were interacting with one another and the instructor via video, they were also manipulating images and bones in a virtual environment that we provided to each participating school. Virtual environments were installed on computers that individual or pairs of students could access. We decided to this rather than having students access an environment from thirty different computers in a single location while the videoconference was happening; we were concerned about bandwidth limitations within individual classrooms.

Now, the virtual environment containing the digitized images was basic and students weren’t interacting with one another within the virtual environment - - they were only interacting with digital learning objects. But the advantages of structuring the learning experience in this manner were clear:

• Students were able to clearly see intricate details and individually manipulate images of dinosaur bones on their own computer screens - - rather than view them via content sharing on a videoconference endpoint (which isn’t always ideal). Because students were interpreting the visuals and then drawing dinosaurs based on those visuals, details were very important.
  
• There was multifaceted interaction throughout the videoconference, which kept students engaged. They were simultaneously interacting in a class-to-class video environment and an individual student-to-learning object environment. Negotiating both environments takes skill - - but our digital native students are fairly adept at this. How many times have you seen a high school student juggle several interactive technologies at once?

The virtual environment students used was created using Virtual Reality Development Lab equipment. MAGPI has partnered with VRDL and is going to be loaning this equipment to schools for 30 day project periods next school year. We’re excited to see what VRDL environments students and teachers design! As I mentioned before, the VRDL environment we created alongside the Academy of Natural Sciences for this program was fairly basic; however, I see a lot of educational potential for this technology - - especially when we put students in the 'driver's seat.' It’s also a great tool for building realistic immersive experiences for students they cannot experience in ‘real life.’ For example, the creators at VRDL often talk about how middle school students created a Japanese Internment Camp VRDL environment as a history project.

I believe the next challenge for combining high-quality interactive video with virtual environments will be to have students interacting with a more complex virtual environment. After that, we might be ready to try having students simultaneously interact with one another (and an instructor) via video while immersed and interacting with one another in a virtual environment like Second Life or Active Worlds. Of course, there has to be a compelling educational and pedagogical reason to do this - - and there’s the added challenge of finding schools that allow students to participate in immersive interactive virtual environments! However, I’m looking forward to exploring even more ways to enhance videoconferencing with other tools and would love to hear your stories.

Many thanks to Gail Barna at Western Wayne School District for sharing these photos of her students participating in the program!

Take a look at student comments from Keystone School District's Technology Blog! (added 5/13/2009)

Twitter and Videoconferencing

Janine Lim, a videoconferencing colleague of mine at Berien RESA in Michigan and all-around VC guru, has a post on her blog today about Videoconference Twitterers. Check it out! And thanks for the mention, Janine!

Personally, I'm pretty excited that Collaborations Around the Planet is now on Twitter! Real time updates for collaborations. What a great idea. If you're interested in collaborations, I highly recommend that you follow all of the people on Janine's list and definitely follow CAPspace.

I'm curious how others might be using Twitter in the videoconference world. I originally signed up for a Twitter account to get real-time updates about new and upcoming programs out. That's actually proved to be pretty effective. But I've also heard of folks using Twitter as back-channel communication for videoconference events (as a means of communicating 'behind the scenes' between sites so they don't have to interrupt the flow of the videoconference event). Other schools and twitterers have mentioned that they've 'saved the day' by putting out a call for help on Twitter to other schools for last minute videoconference connections. Are there other ways Twitter is being used?

I'll be the first to admit that I'm new to the "Twitter" world and still figuring things out - - but so far, have found it to be a great real time communication and collaborative tool.

Classroom Reactions from "Where in Pennsylvania?" and Creating "Video Ready" presentations

Earlier in April, I ran a "Where in Pennsylvania" videoconference for six classes across Pennsylvania. The idea (again, borrowed from the great folks at Berrien RESA and TWICE) is that students connect from different locations around the state and give the other participating schools clues about their location. We had some fantastic presentations that day!

Mr. Jim Knight from Pearl S. Buck Elementary School discussed the program with his class at the conclusion of the event and was kind enough to share the following student feedback with me:

• I liked the variety: giving clues, listening to clues, going somewhere to research, returning to guess, and getting to hear if you were right.
• It was good to see what other classes did after only seeing what our class was doing for the past week.
• We liked seeing ourselves on camera.
• We liked seeing how other classes interpreted what they were asked to do and see how they presented the information.
• It made us feel smart when we guessed the locations of all the other classes.
• Our location seemed tough to guess. Either our clues weren’t very good, or they were really good.

Personally, I am intrigued by the students' comment "we liked how other classes interpreted what they were asked to do and see how they presented information." During this program, we had skits, power point presentations, poster presentations and more. I agree with the students - - seeing how everyone creates their presentations is one of the highlights for me as well!

But creating presentations that are "camera friendly" isn't an easy task. Here are some tips:

• When using multimedia in a presentation, TEST the ability to send the multimedia through the codec with your far site and/or bridge ahead of time. There is nothing more frustrating then trying to share hours of hard work and hitting a technical snag - - not only does it slow the flow of the videoconference, but it adds undue stress. Make sure to test with THE far site (not another far site). There could be compatibility issues with different endpoints.
  
  
• When creating multimedia presentations that involve sound, make sure your audio levels are audible. If you're having trouble hearing your presentation when you're in the same physical space, it will be even harder to hear at the far site. Be sure the microphone is close to the speaker if that's how you are sending the audio to the far site (and be equally sure the other sites are muted to avoid any echo cancellation issues!).
  
  
• If your students are performing a skit, the last place you want to put the microphone is at their feet! The far site will hear more feet scurrying and dropped scripts than they will your students voices. Try putting the microphone up on a desk or chair as close to them as possible. And be sure the microphone is in front of them -- not behind.
  
  
• Speaking of scripts -- rustling papers will literally put a kink in your performance. Students will tend to look down and read (which means the far sites only see the tops of their heads!) and the paper flipping will often time mask your students' voices. Use cue cards next to the camera which will encourage students to look up!
  
  
• When students are performing a skit, it's helpful to set camera presets ahead of time so we can see 'close up' shots of individual actors as well as the group shot. And make sure your group shot is 'in frame.' Meaning, if you have 4 performers, make sure that you get as close as you can to those 4 performers without cutting one of them off in the group shot. It's distracting for the far site to see 4 performers in a large space along with an audience of 30 students.
  
  
• Posters, in general, are great tools for videoconferencing; however, the text on a poster should be kept to a minimum (just the highlights - - no novels necessary) and the font size should be very large. If you can read the poster from across the classroom, you're in good shape. If not.... well, your far site won't be able to read it either.
  
  
• Speaking of posters - - displaying them can be problematic. If you tape them to a whiteboard with a florescent light overhead, chances are that the glare from the light will keep the far sites from being able to see the poster. Avoid glossy textures on your posters (and lamination, too! Preserve the work of art after the videoconference!).

I'm sure there are lots more tips out there! What are your favorite ways to make a student presentation "camera ready?"