Blog feedCommunicate.08 workshop - Videoconferencing between North Lanarkshire and Mallorca
March 8th, 2008
Speaker - Stephen McCrossan, North Lanarkshire Council
What this workshop’s about
North Lanarkshire schools have established strong links with schools in Mallorca. Stephen will outline how videoconferencing has strengthened these links and enhanced the learning experience of the pupils. He will demonstrate the features of the Marratech videoconferencing software and describe examples of its use in the teaching of MFL. There will also be an opportunity for some hands-on experience of using the Marratech videoconferencing software.
The workshop
Stephen went through a couple of projects he’s been involved with at local authority level.
Schools involved in North Lanarkshire were St Margaret’s Secondary School and associated primary schools such as St Dominic’s, St Edward’s. They linked with some schools in Mallorca.
NL has a history of linking with Mallorca. Initially there were teacher visits and pupils sending letters, but now the projects use videoconferencing.
Project goals
Enhancing teachers’ skills - ICT and linguistic skills. Stephen would go out and visit schools to train in ICT, but the main source of support was self-help groups and support groups which were already well established. Lots of telephone support to the Spanish schools, too, to explain how to use the kit. One ICT officer even got sent to Mallorca to train the schools in kit use…
Collaboration and sharing - This was easier for the primary schools as they had their own cluster as well as the Spanish schools.
Improving pupils’ language skills - Stephen will show video
Cultural exchange - they wanetd to show the Spanish pupils what life in Scotland was like.
Improving pupils’ social learning skills - self-assessment and evaluation
About Stephen McCrossan
Stephen McCrossan has taught computing for 15 years, and managed at faculty and departmental level for 12 years. Stephen is currently on a secondment as an ICT Development Officer (Secondary) in North Lanarkshire Council.
Project planning
Had to take a different perspective on the planning of this project. Stephen had to look at a number of influences for their Community of Practice to evolve.
What is a Community of Practice? A group of people who share a passion or interest and learn how to interact as they do their project.
Questions they had to ask about their community, its domain and its practice
- What do we hope to gain?
- What will we learn from each other?
- What do we value?
- Who do we include?
- Who will take the lead roles? (co-ordinator, expert, librarian, for example)
- What sort of knowledge will we use, share and document?
Organisational issues also had to be addressed.
Process
Schools contacted Spain on a fortnightly basis. Teachers, however, contacted each other more often to plan lessons, resources and topics.
Curriculum context
Secondary - S3/S4 & Primary 5-14
Technology
Software used was Marratech videoconferencing software, which wil be available in the Glow environment.
Hardware used was webcams and headphones.
How-to guides used were - a starter guide to videoconferencing produced by Stephen and a technical help sheet produced by the pupils, with key requests and commands in Spanish - e.g. “Could you please turn your mic up?”.
Evaluations
Evaluations were learning-focused, not superficial. It was key that the pupils took responsibility for their own learning. They were asked to:
- think about learning
- the learning environment
- the tasks set
- interest and resources
- favourite/least favourite parts of the lesson
Looking at Marratech
Firstly, Stephen explained that you can download Marratech for the Mac or PC.
Public or private rooms are available - the private rooms you can choose to give people access to.
3 ways of communicating - video, text, voice.
- Video - Stephen showed his own live talk in the top right of the screen.
- Text - Stephen showed on the bottom right of the screen how easy it was to chat to someone.
- Voice - use your own desk mic.
(Not surprisingly, pupils are drawn instantly to text.)
But Marratech has more of an educational slant than other VC software might have - there’s an inbuilt shared whiteboard, for example.
Some ideas to use on your whiteboard
Stephen demonstrated a “reveal/labelling” activity and a sorting activity for the whiteboard. These can all be shared with your partner school(s). He also took a image of himself from the video and labelled “les yeux”.
Importing files - Word, PDF, PowerPoint - onto the whiteboard can also be done easily.
Practical demo
Stephen then asked the delegates to try out Marratech on the Macs supplied. They went to the Paris public rooms and turned their cameras on. There were lots of laughs as people saw themselves appearing…
Normally there would be a lead participant - who would volunteer to say something first?!
Delegates tried out the mics and headphones but we concluded there might not be enough bandwidth for everyone to have this facility on a wireless connection. So just one or two people tried it out and we could hear each other then. Most VC will be done in a hard-wired environment, it is expected.
The videoconferencing can be recorded - great for best practice, HMIE.
How do you set up a room?
Anyone who is an administrator can set up a room. Anyone not playing the game can also be kicked out of the room.
You can send someone the url of a meeting room and, if they don’t have Marractech already, it will download it for them and take them straight to the meeting room.
Private conversations
You can set up a private conversation with another person - and your icon changes from “mic” to “phone”. Remember to take this off again once the private part of the meeting has finished!
Numbers of seats
NL Council has bought 20 seats, so no more than 20 people at once can use the council-licenced Marratech at once. This number may increase in future.
Further information
Read more on the SQA website about these innovative projects.
Read about videoconferencing in the Advanced Higher class on our ICT in Education website.