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Last week as I was asked by William Brookes School if I could attend their Open Evening and give a demonstration of the new video conferencing equipment the LA has installed in the school.

I put out an email to a group of people I thought could assist me and Tim Boundy from Janet (http://www.ja.net/services/video/jvcs/) came up trumps.

Tim arranged for Audra May from The Service Centre at ClearWater, Kansas to connect with us.  This was arranged at 5:30pm on Wednesday and I was due to kick off at 7pm – no pressure!

At 6pm I arrived at William Brookes and found a phone that I could dial Audra on to find out the details of her Video Conferencing unit, on obtaining the details I used JVCS to launch the conference immediately.  I was amazed to see how easy this and I was soon talking to Audra via VC and not the phone.

Audra arranged for three sessions to run and I was able to grab a couple of students to interactive with her tutors.  The sessions broadly covered, Kansas and wheat, learning Chinese and a session on Chinese culture and school life.  During the two hours the number of students I have interacting grew and parents were amazed that we were talking live to tutors in Kansas, USA.

The sessions were tremendously successful and I would recommend using the Service Centre at Clearwater for VC opportunities. You can book the session via CILC (http://www.cilc.org/search.aspx).

All Shropshire secondary schools now have access to Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is accessable through the Learning Gateway in 2 ways. It can be added as a webpart to a page – this allows all staff and pupils to access it to undertake research.  Alternatively, staff can add Britannica resources and links to lessons within Talmos. One of the nice features of Britannica is that pupils can create and share workspaces so that pupils can collaborate on research tasks. For further information email Steve Compton (compton.s@shropshirelg.net)

There was a lot of discussion today at the Heads ICT group about how schools can collaborate, share expertise and learn from each other. We have, of course, tried to encourage collaboration through such means as the ICT conference, the SLG and ICT co-ordinators’ updates, and we have a number of projects in mind for the future. The big question is – does anyone else have any good ideas that will encourage collaboration between school? If so, we would LOVE to hear from you.

With the expanded ICT/E-learning team now in place and with a poke from Dale I have created an it4L account on Twitter, all posts from this blog will be tweeted via the it4L account. To follow it4L tweets, go to http://twitter.com/it4L and if you have an account click the ‘follow’ button.  More information on twitter can be found here.

I have received a request for a KS 1 Class to videoconference with China on 9th April at 11am. This is a great opportunity but at short notice because the original partner was forced to drop out. I have included the link to the JANET Collaborate Opportunity which describes the session in more detail and the original message from Chun Bong, the coordinator for the event.

www.janetcollaborate.ac.uk/opportunities/urgent-videoconferencing-with-china-11-00am-april-9th-2008-uk-time-and-date

“We represent a group of schools in China and we are looking for LEA partners for our video conferencing projects. We have an opening on 11AM April 9th, 2008 for a school to take part. This video conference is free – we have had a sudden dropout. Please advise as to whether there will be any schools interested. The age group is about 5-7 years old. My email is : rn03smr@yahoo.com.hk
Warmest, Chun Bong “.

JANET Collaborate is a ‘one-stop-shop’ for teachers and lecturers looking for opportunities to work collaboratively, especially using videoconferencing.

The website is free to join and use. Members can search through the catalogue of Opportunities to collaborate:

• with museums, galleries, archives and other content providers
• with other teachers in schools in the UK and further afield

The site is arranged in three main sections: Find, Share and Organise.

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