Students introduce Mrs. Wilder's Class to the Kyle Firefighters.

First  and Second graders at several HCISD schools come together via a video conference to ask Kyle Firefighters questions about fire safety. Students in Mrs. Wilder’s class at KES worked hard for over a week to prepare for the Stop, Drop and Roll Video Conference. Mrs. Lombardo, KES librarian, read the book Stop, Drop and Roll by Margery Cuyler. Students then prepared and practice questions to ask a panel of  Firefighters. Other schools that participated included Hemphill, Fuentes and Blanco Vista. Several schools were able to stream the video conference and send questions in using instant messaging.

Students from Hemphill videoconference with their teacher who was in Egypt!

Recently, Mrs. Nora Rodriguez traveled to Egypt to visit her niece. Before she left, she wanted to make sure that she would be able to talk with her students while she was gone.  She set up a blog to record important information about her trip.  One morning around 9 am (4 pm in Egypt) she videoconferenced with her students to talk about the place she was visiting, the culture, the things she had seen, and the foods that she ate. To prepare for the videoconference, her class looked at a few pictures she had sent of herself standing in front of a pyramid and cruising around on a camel. However, during the videoconference, she was in the bustling city! The students were able to learn about the similarities and differences between the place she was visiting and our city of Kyle.

These three pictures were part of the clues given to other schools to guess our landmark. Can you guess it?

Here at Hemphill we are very fortunate to have our very own videoconferencing system. What exactly is a videoconference and how does it help my child learn? We use this tool to help enrich student learning. There are two main types of videoconferences that we do here in our school, collaborative projects and virtual field trips.

This past month we have been doing several collaborative projects, like the Landmark History Challenge (2nd grade) and Our Community (3rd grade). In the Landmark Challenge, students chose a mystery landmark to research and created clues to present to the other classrooms. Those classrooms in turn presented their mystery landmark clues. The students are then given a few days to do research to investigate the other school’s clues. We then have a second videoconference to ask clarifying questions and guess the landmarks that had been presented by each group. At the end of the conference, the students knew more about historical landmarks because of these presentations.

Another type of videoconference occurs through virtual field trips. Mrs. Schneider’s class participated in one this month with the Center of Science and Industry (COSI) in OHIO and they investigated simple machines. The presenter worked with the students on exploring simple machines in two different objects, and showed how these machines are used all around us.

The students in our school are very engaged in learning during these projects. They enjoy getting to interact with students from other schools and taking “field trips” to places they wouldn’t normally be able to go to on a field trip, like the state of Ohio.