IVC Connections

So my second conference for the day was “Our planet Earth” presented by NASA. This involved a 1st grade class at one of my schools. It was pretty good, and the kids were really engaged.

The presenter asked, “If you were an alien and you
landed on earth, how would you describe it?”

 ”What if you landed here?”

He then went through several different pictures of different places on Earth and had the kids describe them. It was interesting to see that some of the kids really seemed to have no reference for some of the environments that he showed.

This is why I think using video conferencing in the classroom is so important. It broadens the minds of our students and helps them to realize that there is a world outside of their classroom, their house, and their city. Maybe by exposing them to other places, they will begin to dream of one day visiting those places. And isn’t that part of our jobs as educators? To help our students dream about things they might one day accomplish? To open their eyes to new opportunities? I certainly hope so.

Today 5 schools participated in the conference “Tobacco: A True Story.” This conference was hosted by TETN in support of the Great American Smoke Out. The presenter was Keisha Leatherman, from the Tarrant County Department of Health. The conference discussed the toxins of cigarettes,  what smoking and smokeless tobacco can do to the body, and ways to refuse tobacco. This was geared towards 4th- 6th grades.

This conference was very informative, even for me. After watching this I don’t know why anyone would start smoking. Did you know that cigarettes contain some of the same ingredients as rat poison, toilet cleaner and gasoline? If they put THAT on the label it might actually be a deterrent.

Students from some schools were able to ask questions. I had one school that was interactive. They asked some great questions. “Why does your breathe stink when you smoke?” The response…”Because it’s just nasty.” The presenter did expound, but I think that sums it up.

Second question, “Why is it legal?” Isn’t that a great question? Bottom line, because money is more important than health. Of course, the presenter put it much better than that.

This was a great conference. I’m really glad that we had some schools participating. If it keeps one or two students from starting to smoke, then it was well worth it. Kudos, TETN and Gerri Maglia, for offering such a beneficial program.

This has to have been the most frustrating and stressful day I have had since starting with videoconferencing. I had five different connections scheduled for today, involving 15 different schools. All of them involved connections outside the district. And if you have kept up with this blog at all, you know that’s where I have problems.

The first two conferences happened at the same time. The first one involved three schools connected with a content provider, all connected through my MCU. This was the first real multi-site call that we had attempted. And it was the first of 4 set up for the day. The second event was a Connect 2 Texas event and also involved three schools. Because I was already using the bridge and we still have bandwidth issues within the district as well, I had Region 10 connect each school directly. This used 4 out of my 5 available calls on my border controller.

We made it through the 30 minute Connect 2 Texas connection just fine. We did have a few bandwidth issues, but no dropped calls. The other conference lasted a bit longer. During the last 20 minutes the call dropped twice. But the teachers still seemed to be happy with the experience.

After that it all went down hill.

The third conference was set up just like the first one. Three schools and one outside content provider connected through the MCU. From the time it connected, I knew we were in trouble. Before the conference even started, I disconnected the content provider to try to get a better connection. I thought we had, until the presenter actually started. The audio kept dropping and it was hard to follow the conversation. And when the conference is a Q & A session, that’s a problem. I tried everything I knew, and tried reconnecting a couple of different ways and nothing seemed to work. Finally, we gave up and decided to reschedule.

Because I had two more conferences that were set up the exact same way, with the same content provider AND because 4 out of the 6 schools were brand new to videoconferencing, I made the tough decision to cancel them as well. I didn’t want the school’s first experience to be a bad one.

To say that I was frustrated and stressed out was an understatement. To say that I need to figure out what is going on is a bigger understatement!

So, I went to lunch to regain a sense of calm, then came back to tackle the problem. 

I set up everything to pull the syslog from the border controller, gatekeeper, and endpoint, and launched a call. The plan was to send the syslogs to Tandberg and have them help me figure out the problem. And par for the course, or Murphy’s Law, or something, the call stayed up for over an hour with no problems. I tired a couple of other calls, and again, not one disconnect.

This was just not my day. To top it all off, I’m posting this at 6:30 on a Friday night, because I couldn’t log in at work! Again, network issues. At that point I had had enough, and here I am.

Next week has got to be better.

So today I met with some teachers at one of my campuses via video. For most of them this was the first time they had used videoconferencing and things went very smoothly. The topic of discussion was how IVC fit into their curriculum.

My goal for these meetings (and I’m planning more) is to talk with the teachers about what topics they have coming up in their curriculum. Then we will plan some activities and virtual field trips to fit what they are already doing in the classroom.

Our district is in the process of creating/revising Curriculum Planning Guides for every grade level and subject area. This will hopefully provide more consistency among the campuses with the hope that everyone will be on the “same page at the same time”. Some of these are finished, some of these are not. So while I was asking the teachers to tell me what they had coming up in January and February, many of them did not know simply because the CPGs are not ready. In addition, several of them were new to their grade level and were still learning about the curriculum themselves.

While today’s discussions were not as informative as I would have liked, we did come up with some good ideas that I will be pursuing. And I was impressed with the teacher’s willingness to help with a project when they have so much on their plate already. Overall it was a good day and I look forward to the next time.

Well, I thought we had solved our issues with quality, but today I realized that we now have a new issue. And in my opinion, one that is worse than the bad video quality we had before. Now our calls are dropping.

I first noticed this last week with the Megaconference. And because we had not had that problem before, I dismissed it as being a Megaconference problem. Well, today I placed some calls and had the same problem. We can have a beautiful, crystal clear connection when all of the sudden it will freeze, then drop. This can be after 10 minutes, 30 minutes or 2 minutes. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to it. After the call drops it takes me about 3-4 minutes before I can get it reconnected. I get a message saying “the number does not exist.” The same message I get when one of my units is not turned on or registered to the Gatekeeper.

So it makes me wonder if there is now a problem with the Gatekeeper. However, it does only seem to happen with calls outside of our district. So maybe it is the Border Controller.

And of course, I have an important call tomorrow afternoon with a lot of administration people and calls scheduled all day Friday. So needless to say tomorrow morning will be spent testing and searching for a solution.

The saga continues….

Yesterday I participated in Megaconferencefor the first time. I had heard a lot of buzz about Megaconference, but didn’t really know what to expect. This is my take on it.

Megaconference is just that, a MEGA videoconference. I’m not sure how many sites were connected through out the day, but there were a lot. It lasted the entire day, 6 am – 7 pm CST. There were presentations by people in Wales, Canada, Croatia, Slovenia, China, Australia, and others. To think about how all those connections were made is just phenomenal.

Initially, I connected directly to the Internet2 Commons bridging service. This worked well for the first 4 hours. Then starting about 10 am, the call started dropping. And continued to drop. I tried to connect two other ways, through Region 10, and through Janine’s bridge in Michigan. But the dropping continued. So I started to wonder, is it my network? (As you may have read we have been plagued with network issues until just recently.) Mysteriously, the dropping stopped at about 1:30 and things were good again until about 4. The the dropping started again. AARRGHH! Since it was almost time to go home anyway, I gave up.

I never did figure out why it was dropping, but I don’t totally believe that it was our network. The times that it was dropping there was a lot of video switching going on, and I mean A LOT. We would have a good connection, it would freeze, then Boom! it was gone. Who knows?

The second observation about the Megaconference is that it didn’t really seem to have a theme. This was their 10th anniversary for having it, so there was a lot of talk about that. There were also several presentations on “then and now”, reminiscing about how it used to be. But other than that, people just presented on whatever topic they wanted to. It was really interesting.

My third observation has to do with etiquette. I was surprised, and not surprised at the same time, at the number of open mics. Again, this is a huge conference and people didn’t realize they had an open mic! People, come on! If you are going to participate is something of this magnitude, even if you have it running in the background like I did, make 100% sure that your mic is muted. There was one point that some lady must have been using a webcam setup to watch it, with the privacy “screen” set. For about 30 minutes we heard her type, place phone calls, etc, while the video continually jumped to a black screen. It was driving the video, and me, crazy!

Overall, it was an OK experience and I’m glad I tuned in, but with the technical difficulties I encountered, it does make me hesitate before jumping into Megaconference Jr. with students.

Article submitted by Deborah Mayville

On Wednesday, November 5, 2008, the Student Council members of Jerry Junkins Elementary school participated in a video conferenc with students from Guatemala along with 30 other countries around the globe. Change for Children based in Alberta, Canada founded the event, VC for HOPE, in which global fundraisers would help rebuild schools of coastal communities in Guatemala that were distroyed by fundraisers would help rebuild schools of coastal communities in Guatemala that were destroyed by Hurricane Stan in 2005. This year’s goal is to raise enough money to build a four classroom school house that will house 360 students to be taught in their indigenous Mayan language.

Jerry Junkins’ students are hosting a campus wide fundraiser called the Great Turkey Race. The objective is for students to buy feathers for a quarter to cover their grade-level turkey. The team with the most feathers will get to conference with the students of Guatemala on December 3, to present the entire collection of donations.

Being that Junkins is the only school participating from Texas, we invite any and all campuses to help with donations. This remarkable cause will create new memories for the unfortunate students in Guatemala as well as give our students the gift of education.

This fall I have been very proud of the fact that our usage has increased. We currently have more events on the calendar than we did the entire fall of last year. The number of events has increased by 27%, and we haven’t even hit December yet when there is usually a rush of usage.

However, my excitement has been curbed by the fact that while the number of events is up, the actual number of schools using videoconferencing is down, significantly. Last year for the fall I had 35 out of 41 schools using their equipment for at least one conference in the fall. That is a usage rate of 85%. This year, however, that usage rate has dropped to 27%. Of the 52 schools that I have with equipment, only 14 of them have anything listed on the calendar. 

While I suspect that the drop in usage has to do with what has been happening in our district this year, it’s time to pick up the pieces and start moving forward. 

Time to start thinking out of the box to get more schools involved.

As I said in my previous posts, this year we did the Monster Exchange totally in district with 38 classrooms participating. In case you are unfamiliar with the Monster Exchange here is a quick overview. Classroom A creates a monster and writes a description of it. They send their monster description to Classroom B. Classroom B tries to recreate the monster based on the description. Classroom B has also created a monster, written a description, and shared it with Classroom A. The videoconference is the culmination of the project where the two classrooms compare the original monsters with the recreations.

This project has many curricular connections. The most obvious are art and descriptive writing. But many classes also integrate math with using shapes and measurements in their descriptions.

During the live conference, I tried to reinforce the descriptions of the monsters. With the older students, 3rd and 4th graders, we discussed what information they could have included in their description to help their partner class get closer to the original. This really got them thinking about the details of their monster and how to communicate it’s different features. I would extend this by finishing up with a guessing game. I would have two or three students from each site describe their Halloween costume and the other site would try to guess what they were going to be. The kids seem to enjoy this as much as making the monsters.

With the younger students, PK-2, we would discuss the similarities and differences between their monsters. Again, I really tried to reinforce the use of descriptive language and details. I also finished these conferences with having students describe what they were going to be for Halloween, without the guessing game.

Everytime, I do this activity, I am amazed at how close the recreations are to the original. See for yourself…

To see more monster examples, go to the Monster Exchange 2008 gallery. Please note, this only a representative of the monsters created. I did not have pictures of all of the conferences. If you have pictures you would like me to add to the gallery, please feel free to email them to me. I must have a release form for any picture that includes a student.