Trans-Tasman interclass virtual conferencing
Level: Year 10
School: Wellington East Girls' College
Teacher: Cris Roughton
Category: Educating in a global context
Students' webzines:
Amanda Ashleigh
Poppy Deanna
Nileesha Janoo
For her Year 10 ICT class, Cris created a project where students would develop a webzine exploring the social and technological phenomena of social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo. This would provide a rich vein of material for the Nature of Technology strand which focuses on the wider social implications of technology, while developing planning for practice, outcome development, domain knowledge, and skills in IT.
An extra dimension was added to the project by including an international virtual conferencing element. By communicating and comparing their findings on social networking sites with students from Warrandyte High School in Melbourne, the students had an opportunity to reflect on the effect of virtual conferencing on student motivation and learning outcomes.
The project started with an email on the New Zealand Information Science Teachers' listserv from Claire Bloom, ICT Coordinator of Warrandyte High School in Melbourne, asking if any New Zealand School were interested in virtual conferencing with their Year 10 Media Studies class. Claire was involved in a project with the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) in Victoria, Australia, which was responding to the demands of the technological age with a new initiative – 'Knowledge Bank: Next Generation' (KB:NG).
"That sounded really interesting so I answered her, and together we came up with the social networking idea," says Cris. "I wanted to push the global classroom idea so that the girls really got a sense of the power that technology can give us, and what virtual conferencing software, computers, and the internet can allow while having fun and exploring."
Social Networking Sites Most
Used by Students (click to enlarge)
There were initial software issues to be resolved. For example, Warrandyte High were using the Elluminate conferencing system, which was incompatible with the Wellington East network, making initial developments very slow until the schools made the decision to use Skype instead.
Once these issues were resolved, the girls were put into pairs to interact with a partner pair in Australia. Introductions then began between the New Zealand pair and their Australian counterparts, which Cris describes as an "unavoidably slow" process as students needed time to get to know each other before launching in to their project. They also had to take into account different time zones and class schedules. The students then began emailing each other, looking at each other's projects and developing plans of approach.
Cris decided to take a step back at this stage. "I was really trying to facilitate and not be too prescriptive about what the students did each day. I wanted to empower them to take ownership of their project, to manage it, to set deadlines, and work out what they had to do to progress to the next step. This worked really well with some and not so well with others, as these things do."
For the social networking component, the students identified differences in attitudes between older and younger generations to social networking. The students surveyed and interviewed classmates, parents, and grandparents, the results of which were then displayed in graphs on the webzine with useful and informative quotes interspersed throughout. The social networking component neatly overlapped with the virtual conferencing section as students conducted surveys and interviews with the Australian class. As the unit progressed and information was gathered, the students began creating their webzines to present it.
The students found that following good Technological Practice was a huge help to them in organising such a complicated project, particularly in planning. Cris had developed a planning template from previous units that the students found extremely useful for staying on track and improving time management and teamwork within the group.
Cris says that things did not always go smoothly, with communication problems between the teams due to a lack of technical and social experience. "There was a problem with emailing as the girls were too young to fully understand the sensitivity and finesse required in email conversation. In one case, they got the wrong email address and thought that the other team wasn't responding so there was a breakdown in communication and I had to step in and help."
For this project, Cris found that conventional classroom management wasn't the best way to provide guidance and resolve student problems as class time often became absorbed working with individual groups. "I communicated to the whole class through email to keep them on track and got them to reply to me if something was worrying them. This approach was quite unconventional but I actually think we gelled more as a class through email."
All three components of the project developed and challenged the skills of the students. The social networking component encouraged good Technological Practice, it developed the social and communicative skills needed for conducting the interviews and surveys, and developed knowledge and skills in software use of web-based applications such as Google Docs . For the virtual conferencing and webzine components, the students learned to use Skype and applications such as Dreamweaver, and also gained a good grounding in copyright law.
Despite the considerable challenges of this project, its outcomes surpassed Cris's initial goals. "I think the girls gained insight into some really positive aspects of IT. I also wanted them to develop some social skills and self-management skills, so I really focussed on the key competencies and the unit worked beautifully in fitting into that."
There were also social benefits that arose that truly explored the Nature of Technology strand. "It got the girls thinking at a deeper level about social aspects, like the generation gap, why some of the more technologically-challenged members of the older generation have a negative view of social networking sites and what drives that feeling. So I think it helped them to understand their parents and grandparents better. It also engendered some really good discussions that explored the good use, and misuse, of technology."
The unit has also raised awareness of Technology within the school. "The other classes were interested in what we were doing which was great. I really think this is becoming a movement in schools now where kids are realising that the world is their stage and that with a good process they can do anything. I feel that with the technological process you give the students a gift where they can find the skills within themselves to attack problems creatively, which is applicable to virtually anything they will come across in the future."
Cris described a situation where she had three Year 13 students attend a 2009 Technology Innovation Challenge run by Otago University. The girls were given a task that overawed them completely until one of them suggested that they could approach it using the technological process they had learned in IT. They did so and won their section.
An unexpected outcome of the project is the firm bond that has developed between the two schools, with the students and teachers developing some genuine friendships with their trans-Tasman peers. Cris and Claire are planning a similar ICT unit for 2010.
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