Skyping with the voyagers
With big noses pressed against the camera lens and echoing children’s voices “Who are you???? What’s the weather like???” Jody Hayes and I launched into our Skype Experiment.
Her class are 5 and 6 year olds, mine are 7 so the level of conversation, let alone collaborative input is somewhat limited.
So this is what we managed to establish in the 15 minutes of to-ing and fro-ing: its fine weather in
Hastings and its raining at Palmerston North.
To any meteorologist this is fascinating stuff; the prevailing Westerly winds, sweeping across the country increase in altitude as they rise above the Ruahine Range, dumping their watery load before descending upon the Heretaunga plains and sweeping dry air through
Hastings. Palmerston North lies to the south of theRuahine
Range and is not within the rain shadow just described.
To a 5/6/7 year old the observation is “Ahhh, that’s not fair, we’ve got wet play and you haven’t.”
Bring on skypetalkandwrite for the Mac is what I say, and then we can start recording this stuff in a more meaningful way.
Yesterday Paul Harrington’s class in Wales sung me Happy Birthday in Welsh via Skype. It was excellent- distance is becoming less of a barrier. From the other side of the world in nano-second.
Yes… sorry about that … we were JUST TOO EXCITED … and who says learning isn’t fun. Hopefully over our next few weeks regular Skype conversations we will get past this and a little deeper… but who knows… just the concept of seeing people talking to us on the data show is pretty huge to grasp for my lovely children… maybe that is learning enough!
(We just need a better microphone.)
Thank you for your patience and acceptance of things going a little off the planned agenda… that is the joy of teaching 5 year olds … everyday is EXCITING!!!
We have been talking to Kathy Cassidy’s class in Canada on yackpack too which was pretty good because it is so simple the children are in control of it all!
Talk on Tuesday.