USN and
Canadian Academy, At It Again!
On the 10th of May 2001, the
students of Lynn Noel’s 3rd grade class and those of Darrick
Mosser’s 4th grade got together. It is not so very remarkable for
two classrooms of kids to meet, but when the two classrooms are separated by
half the diameter of the world, well, that’s something to chat about. The
pictures on this web page were “screengrabbed” from a computer in Room 211W,
University School of Nashville, in Nashville, Tennessee. The larger pictures
inside each CU SeeMe window feature students in a room at Canadian Academy,
Kobe, Japan.
Our students had been corresponding via
email for two months and now they got the chance to meet their keypals,
real-time, and even to hear some of their voices.
Sure, the computers crashed! Ours in
Nashville collapsed under the pressure of flying bytes once, and Mr. Mosser
went offline twice during the 50-minute experience. Dutiful facilitators at
both ends scurried to reconnect. While the teachers decided to turn off the microphones and speakers at both ends of our conference in order to preserve video bandwidth, children in a Yahoo Clubs chatroom tried to
make sense out of the interface enough to post messages and read them. Finally we all gathered in front of each camera to see each other’s keypal and the teachers communicated our words by typing into the CU-SeeMe chatboard (see an unedited copy of most of our dialogue here. Time ran out when our PE teacher came to see where her class was.
All these things notwithstanding, it was a good time. We hope you enjoy the “screengrabs” that follow:
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School of Nashville