We officially kicked off the Brooklyn, North Carolina project on Friday, October 4th!
At 11:00 am we did a "Mystery Hangout" between the two classes. We've chosen to replace Skype with Google Hangouts for the duration of his project due to it's more robust feature set. The goal is to record sessions, allow multiple students on multiple machines to participate (not just 1 screen 1 caller), share screen content, and so forth. Skype is great, but Hangouts offer the possibility for a far more engaging experience.
That being said, we forgot to record the first Hangout...
... we also forgot to tweet and take pictures. First day jitters I suppose. Actually, more like first day excitement. The 3rd graders were so excited and asking so many questions before we began the thought of recording, tweeting & photographing completely escaped me. On the other side, the pre-service teachers were also so intrigued by the "unknown" the record button was overlooked...
... the the "unknown" was exactly what was happening...
In both Brooklyn and Hickory the students were kept in the dark about the project. Before the Hangout all that was said was "we're calling other people about a project we'll be doing."
The Hangout was a 20-Questions game with each side asking the other 5 questions at a time, trying to figure out who they were, where they were, and exactly what we'd be doing.
It was a great session with lots of excitement on both sides!
This coming Friday we'll be doing another Hangout and getting more in-depth with the project and related materials such as potential blogs and using our hashtag #NCNYC to get the Twitter ball rolling!
The students and student-teachers have officially met. The project is underway.
Stay tuned!
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